Anyone have experience with 40Gbit fiber cards for 15000/23000?

[Timothy_Hall]

An option on the new 15000 and 23000 series appliances is a 4x10Gbit fiber card:

4 Port 10GBase-F SFP+ interface card  - CPAC-4-10F-B-INSTALL

Does anyone have experience (good or bad) working with this relatively new NIC?  Other than being mentioned in SecureKnowledge as the first non-Intel NICs to support multi-queue, there really isn't much other info available about them.  I'm asking because these seem to be one of the very few non-Intel NIC cards that Check Point has made available for its appliances in recent years.  It appears the manufacturer of these is Mellanox and the driver name displayed by ethtool -i is "mlx5_core".  Thanks!

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[Vladimir]

Hi Tim.

I have performed a number of installations of 15000/23000s with these modules.

Nothing negative to report so far, but the appliances have not been under heavy load yet, (to the best of my knowledge).

[Timothy_Hall]

Hmm just found out that the optional 25G/100G fiber NICs for the 15000/23000 (which also appear to be manufactured by Mellanox), are not supported with SMT/Hyperthreading according to sk116742.  Guess this means SMT/Hyperthreading is not supported with the 40G card either although I can't find anything specifically stating that.

Vladimir, do you have SMT/Hyperthreading enabled on the systems where you are using the 40G cards?  Any chance you are using the 25G/100G cards too?

--
My book "Max Power: Check Point Firewall Performance Optimization"
now available via http://maxpowerfirewalls.com.

[Vladimir]

Hyperthreading was not enabled on the units with 4x10GBE.

And no, I didn’t get a chance to use the 100GBE(4x25GBE?) NICs.

You may also check the compatibility of these cards with the SSL accelerator module that was released this Summer that is being used in the same slots as NICs.

vlad@eversecgroup.com

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