Can R81.20 Support 10Gb interfaces?

[Duane_Hartman]

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?

[PhoneBoy]

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

[Duane_Hartman]

This is a VSEC appliance running on VMWare.

[PhoneBoy]

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.

[Duane_Hartman]

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.

[PhoneBoy]

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. 

[Timothy_Hall]

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.

[Chris_Atkinson]

The following resources might be helpful for you:

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

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

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