Reddit reviews Protectli Vault 4 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core, Barebone

The protectli works well.
Here's the Amazon link
I bought the storage and RAM as a bundle, but an mSATA drive is what you want as the unit runs pretty warm. Keep it away from anything that is heat sensitive.

FreeNAS is great! It's been around for years, and ZFS is rock solid. I'm using the SSD as an L2ARC, and I've segregated all storage traffic to a separate subnet across two NICs on all servers, which makes a huge difference!

I do recommend finding a case that will keep the spinning drive noise to a minimum and putting money into RAM over a faster CPU.

oVirt works well. I'm not running the "self-hosted" engine. I tried it, but there's some glitch that prevented me from moving that VM from one host to another. I find that I don't need that flexibility anyway.

It really depends on your Internet speed.

The D525 is ancient tech. Serviceable as pfSense? Sure, but not for a lot of bandwidth and/or plugins. I mean, the J1900 or N3250 Qotom mini PCs will be twice as capable at almost half the cost. Skip the Supermicro.

The R210ii are really the sweet spot. More computing power than you really need, but only idling in the 20-30w range. The list is pretty long of cheap and capable R210iis.

I would probably get the R210ii, get an ODD drive bay and drop a tiny SSD in it. I still run my pfSense off a USB stick, but I don't have much logging happening.

foxreymann -

I don't think the "light bulb" has gone on for you yet. Cisco is gonna cost $$$. You don't like Ubiquity which is fine. Mitrotik will have a learning curve.

Your best bet here is PFSENSE!

Just spend $250 and get the fanless Intel Quadcore w/ 4x1Gbps interfaces:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GIVQI3M?psc=1

You'll be able to setup load balancing or failover of your internet connections (I'm guessing you have 250mbps on one connection but the other is probably a much slower backup?).

I just bought the following. I put PFsense on it. Nice little box. I bought 8 gigs of RAM and a 120 gig SSD with it.




Firewall Micro Appliance With 4x Gbe Intel Lan Ports for PFSense barebones https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GIVQI3M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_0fIHxb55225FK

I got this a few months ago:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01GIVQI3M/ref=oh_aui_i_d_old_o0_img?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That+msata ssd+ram and it's amazing.

Fanless, feels rock solid, nice and fast and responsive. No regrets.

Then why not use something like this: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01GIVQI3M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Maybe something like this? It's powered by the J1900 platform everyone's been talking about.

Gigabyte Mini Barebone System

It includes a case, motherboard, and CPU. You'll need to provide your own RAM and a boot drive. You could then run an external USB drive to get your 1TB of storage.

If you think you might want to build your own router at some point, consider getting one with a few extra NICs so that you can run PFsense on it instead down the road:

ProtectCLI Firewall Micro Appliance

There are a lot of small j1900 machines out there with multiple nics, for example https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-Barebone/dp/B01GIVQI3M/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_469_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=BQPMYE25AA9C9EZF1DA3

I actually bought one of those through Ali Express recently. Other than it being a giant pain in the arse to get a credit card to go through... it was a fine transaction.

You can get that unit on Amazon though.

I worked through this guide to set up the OS (not pfSense although pfSense is totally fine to use!)

Something like this might fit your requirements. It's a bit older/slower CPU than others have suggested, but is still a quad-core celeron, has 4x intel NICs, and only draws about 11 watts:

with ram/msata ssd - $359

without ram/ssd - $200

Check out pfsense with something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01GIVQI3M/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1505001255&sr=8-4&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=pfsense&dpPl=1&dpID=41OvNDM8FPL&ref=plSrch

Honestly, I'd go with Cisco SG series switches. You can get them pretty much as big or as small as you want, they have both Web GUI and CLI, generally much more affordable compared to enterprise level switches, and they have POE capabilities as well.

If you are going to be using Proxmox or Untangle (my preference is Untangle) for a router/firewall, you really don't need the Edge Router, since they will fulfill your layer 3 needs. Instead, you can save that money and get a PoE enabled switch, probably with a lot more ports.

As far as hardware for Proxmox/Untangle, you can get something like this and have plenty of processing power for whatever ISP connection you have.

Unless the Atom C line has been sorted out, I'd suggest a Celeron J3455 build as a decent perf/watt point. They're cheap and fairly powerful - I believe ASRock has one for ~$60. Tag a pcie dual nic card on, whatever for storage (unless you want squid), 2-4gb ram and you're good to go.

A lot of these low end SoC's and Pentiums are more than sufficient for pfSense. Compare them against a middle of the road core2duo as a benchmark for a basic pfSense box. Need VPN, Snort, Squid, whatever? hike it up accordingly.

E: here's a barebones box: https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-Barebone/dp/B01GIVQI3M

I needed one in a hurry about a month ago and the Qotom model was showing a long delivery time so I bought this similar system instead. I am fairly certain it is the same system just sold under a different name. I threw in 8GB RAM and a Transcend 64GB mSATA which brough my total cost to around $265.

They work extremely well, rock solid with great throughput. My only complaint is they seem to run a little hotter than I would like.

vLANs themselves don't really have bandwidth benefits; they reduce broadcast domains, and they can simplify QoS I find it unlikely that you have a broadcast domain problem. QoS necessity is totally dependent on bandwidth and usage.
 
I'm not sure what the minimum hardware would be for the performance you need. Personally, my network is built on Lenovo TS140s (E3-1225v3) with used quad port Sun NICs and Chelsio T2 10GBe adapters. I can push a LOT of packets, but don't have a great idea of minimum performance. Also, I have no experience at the moment with pfSense, working with Sophos, Vyos, Sonicwall and HP products mostly.
[Something like this would be intereseting] (https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-PFSense-barebones/dp/B01GIVQI3M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485580586&sr=8-1&keywords=network+appliance)
[pfSense hardware guide] (https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/)
 
Your existing hardware is a box I've toyed with using for a portable appliance a couple of times. The edge router, internal router setup is common; it separates duties and provides some sense of security. Level of security is arguable, but we'll leave that for now. The big Ubiquiti routers I mentioned are nice because they get you almost all the performance/features of high-end layer 3 switches in a fairly low cost. I'd pick the Edgerouter Pro; bump up the CPUfor about a 5-10% cost increase. A number of cheaper layer 3 switch options don't perform the same way. I know Mikrotik CRS devices have abysmal routing features while being extraordinarily good deals for basic layer 2 functions. On the other hand, I've verified that the Edgeswitch 48 can at least route 10Gbps. Unsure of the cheap dlinks, DGS-1500-20 looks interesting if it performs
 
If you are just a performance fiend, the sale price Xeon E3 servers, combined with network cards with offload capabilities, will just wreck anything else you'd likely want to afford. Barring that, I think the Edgeswitch/Edgerouter options are probably going to outperform anything else in the affordable range. The Dlink I linked above might actually be the cheapest option, but I haven't managed to verify it's routing performance.
 
Apologies if I've just muddied up the waters on the process; I'll review my post when I'm not falling asleep. In the meantime, do you have any definition of performance you're looking to improve? I'm sure we can point you in the right direction, but as I stated, VLANning alone won't see any significant performance enhancement.

As u/prutseratwork stated, the pfSense store is where the official pfSense boxes are sold. I don't think that those would really meet your "ungodly amount" criteria. They are insanely expensive for what you're actually getting. Not to say that supporting the team isn't a good cause, because it is. It's a very good cause. But when you need a solution and money is tight, the official store may not be your best option.

pfSense is based on FreeBSD, which does support wifi. However, its use is generally discouraged, because it's trash. If you want to use pfSense, you should also have a separate access point. Note that you can (and likely should) use your existing router for this. You would simply disable the firewall on your current router, making it a switch with built-in wifi, and insert pfSense into your network directly after the modem. So, Modem > pfSense > old router.

Not having the technical ability to build a system is going to be a problem. Your cheapest option is to buy a system that is pre-built, but doesn't come with an SSD or memory. You'll have to purchase those separately and install them yourself. You need to ask yourself if that is going to be too much work - because if so, pfSense is not for you. It's going to be a lot of work and learning.

Pre-built systems (you install SDD, memory, and pfSense)

https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-Barebone/dp/B01GIVQI3M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498485157&sr=8-1&keywords=qotom

https://www.amazon.com/Barebones-Firewall-Intel-Ports-Celeron/dp/B01MEGSMRZ/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&qid=1498485291&sr=8-21&keywords=qotom

I bought a Qotom box a long time ago for about $150. It had 4 Realtek ports, though. Intel is definitely the preferred solution.


If none of these sound good to you, look into Ubiquiti Security Gateway.