topic Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces? in General Topics

Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

Duane_Hartman — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 15:39:08 GMT

I currently have a 1Gb internet facing interface, along with 1-1Gb internal and 2-1Gb interfaces. Does anyone know what the max. interface speed is, and what contingencies there may be to this solution?

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

PhoneBoy — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 15:40:58 GMT

What specific hardware?
This isn’t a version specific question, but a hardware specific one.

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

Duane_Hartman — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 15:44:14 GMT

This is a VSEC appliance running on VMWare.

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

PhoneBoy — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 17:23:50 GMT

Right, but it's still a hardware specific question because there is ultimately a NIC driver involved 🙂
On my R81.20 system using the vmxnet3 driver, I can see the virtual interface supports 10gb.
You can see this with ethtool and the relevant interface name.
If you're using, say, an e1000 driver, you'll be limited to 1gb.

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

Duane_Hartman — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 20:45:06 GMT

It is actually the E1000E virtual adapter. If this won't work, will it work with the VMXNET3 virtual adapter? The underlying hardware adapters will be switched to Broadcom 10Gb fiber adapters.

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

PhoneBoy — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 22:12:39 GMT

e1000 is emulating actual hardware, so it’s going to be slower than vmxnet3 and max out at 1gb line rate.
vmxnet3 does list a 10gb line speed for the vNIC.
Whether you’ll get anywhere near that sort of line rate out of that virtual NIC in VMware is a separate question.

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

Timothy_Hall — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:59:02 GMT

Just to add on to what Phoneboy said the vmxnet3 also supports Multi-Queue while e1000 does not, this comes in very handy for my Gateway Performance Optimization course where attendees interact with Multi-Queue on virtualized gateways. We also enable and work with Dynamic Split and Hyperflow/Pipeline Processing even though doing so is not supported on a virtualized gateway.

Re: Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

Chris_Atkinson — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 02:33:14 GMT

The following resources might be helpful for you:

https://www.checkpoint.com/downloads/products/cloudguard-gateway-performance-for-vmware-esxi-datasheet.pdf

https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk104848

https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk169252