October 30, 201312 yr My X9SCM is running Esxi 5.1 and unRaid 5 along with not much else yet. I want to add pfsense to it. The 2 ports on the MB won't be enough for pfsense and unRaid, and ipmi. ebay has Intel dual and quad port pci-e cards in many different flavors. Pro/1000 GT, PT, VT What Intel Nic card should I get?
October 31, 201312 yr I was planning on doing the same and went with the Quad PT. I chose the Quad because of a need for multiple WAN connections. It's PCI-e and half height for better case airflow. Only hiccup was having to swap slots with my M1015 otherwise unRaid wouldn't see any drives. If I'm not mistaken the GT is PCI-x and won't fit the X9SCM anyway. Don't know anything about the VT to be honest. I've got the PT configured with ESXI 5.1 and the virtual switches setup but after installing pfsense I never had time to configure and bring it online for actual use. That will have to be my Winter project. BTW, why can't you use the built in ports? Set one to WAN the other to LAN.
October 31, 201312 yr Author Seems pfsense wants 3 then unRaid needs 1. Ended up going with Hotlava/Intel Vesuvius 6C11810A3 Six Port Gigabit Ethernet PCIe Adapter, but was planning on a PT quad too. Sent from my mobile
October 31, 201312 yr My PT setup has 2 ports dedicated to WAN and one port for LAN which is connected to an external hardware switch. Within ESXI I've setup virtual switches to manage connections between pfsense the WAN/LAN connections and the virtual machines (including unRaid). Unless you have some really crazy network layout there's no need to have dedicated ports on the PT NIC for each VM. Just setup virtual switches inside ESXI. This excellent post was a big help: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/PfSense_2_on_VMware_ESXi_5
October 31, 201312 yr I have a similar set up as PCRx as well. Just in case people are thinking of a similar setup, here is a screen shot of my network setup in esxi. My mb doesnt have the capability to do IPMI... Because I am using most of my PCI and PCIe slot, I only had one PCIe x1 available.. so i got this intel NIC : http://amzn.com/B001CY0P7G vminc2 is some internal NIC in the mb. some realtek i believe. The physical ethernet port is connected to a gigabit switch, which is connected to all my local devices. vmnic0 is the intel NIC i bought. this is directly connected to the cable modem, for WAN connection.
November 1, 201312 yr Author Know that I won't need them all, but with a failover WAN I for sure need 2 plus one more for LAN. With only 4 PCIe slots for cards, 3 already full with raid cards, I didn't want to waste a slot for a single lan port.
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