R80.10: MultiCore IPSec VPN & Route-based VPNs
While the vast majority of network connections can be efficiently balanced across the
available Firewall Worker cores (Run the fw ctl multik stat command and look at
the Connections column to see this in action), there is one glaring exception on R77.30
gateway and earlier: IPSec VPN handling. By default on R77.30, all IPSec-based and
SSL VPN-based encryption and decryption can only take place on the lowest-numbered
Firewall Worker core ( fw_0 ).
I’m pleased to report though that the single-core IPSec VPN limitation in R77.30
gateway has at long last been resolved in R80.10+. IPSec VPN traffic is now balanced
across all Firewall Worker cores by default on R80.10+ gateway. The commands vpn
tu tlist and vpn tu mstats can be used to monitor the state of this new capability.
While it is technically possible to switch off this MultiCore IPSec feature by setting the
kernel variable enable_ipsec_multi_core to zero on R80.10+, doing so is not
supported as explicitly stated here: sk118097: MultiCore Support for IPsec VPN in
R80.10 and above.