NAS, Pfsense virtualization

[forge153]

NAS/PF Sense

 

I'm looking forward to build a Nas and run PF Sense virtually. My Nas would be running raid 5. I was wondering that do I need a raid card because I heard that raid 5 takes up a lot of computing power, if so can I just get a good Cpu to compute rather than use a raid card?

And what CPU should I get AMD vs INTEL. 

 

Thankyou :)

 

 

[rufee]

Since you wont need that CPU power for anything else you dont need a dedicated raid card, you wont see a performance hit.

If you want more SATA3 ports go for AMD and their APU's or something in the FX series (not an AMD guy here), this will help you save on cost.

If you are an Intel fan boy, a Core i3 is what you would want. Even better if you can get your hands on an older gen system that would work fine as well.

[forge153]

Thanks  :D

[LargeGeek]

Going with a RAID5 is a great solution to how I did this a few years ago. And GOOD LUCK. I hope you have found a good walkthrough on getting the connections bridged properly. I virtualized Smoothwall on a Win7 machine that was under powered for what I had it doing. I had it working very well for about a year and was seeing awesome improvements in ping & throughput. Unfortunately after an update to something it all came undone and I could never get it to work again. That same box is now running as a dedicated PFSense firewall.

 

Any full desktop class, multi-core CPU should do the trick. And if you at all have any other ideas for virtualization, please buy the CPU power for it now. And RAM, RAM, RAM. And the RAID solves one of the problems I had.

[Ssoele]

I've had a lot of problems trying to get to run PFSense virtually, just giving you the heads up.