Joseph Day

warning: drastically reduced network performance

• September 05, 2014
• Review verified by AWS Marketplace

we've tried virtualizing pfsense before with XenCenter and with VMWare. unless you have some really fancy set of drivers and linux build and hypervisor that can forward the NIC hardware directly to the vm in the most near-real-time way, pfsense will cause your network performance to suffer greatly when used as an internet gateway.

we thought that the pfSense Certified label would mean they had this kind of fancy setup, but alas there is no magic here. i would not recommend for anything but the most basic services that do not have a high performance network requirement.

if you just need openvpn access, install a micro instance with ubuntu and use the openvpn package, and then stick with the regular aws-provided vpc + internet gateway + elastic ip + security group firewall setup for WAN internet access.

pfSense is a great product, and we love to use it everywhere we can, and we're really sad we can't use it at AWS--it was worth a try, but it really only performs well on bare-metal.

WITH Netgate pfSense tcp iperf = 2-5Mbits throughput, with wildly fluctuating ping times.
WITHOUT Netgate pfSense tcp iperf = 50-100Mbits throughput, with consistent ping times.
Our test was using an m3.xlarge instance.

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