Wow! It’s been almost like 4 weeks and we’ve already reached our target number of beta test users. It was an awesome experience to see that much interest from the community. Many thanks for that. We’re grateful.
During this time, we received emails asking us how to properly do the sizing for the hardware the Sensei plugin is running on.
It’s important to note: because of the nature of packet analysis and granular drill-down reporting, a firewall with Sensei will be more demanding than a standard OPNsense installation.
We’ve been reported that Sensei was successfully deployed and used in environments with up to 850 users and with 300 Mbps Uplink.
We’d like to share our recommendations for Minimum Hardware Specifications for running Sensei plugin on OPNsense firewall.
CPU & Memory
| Number of Users | WAN Bandwidth | Recommended Minimum Memory | Recommended Minimum CPU Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-25 | 20 Mbps | 8 GB | Intel Dual-Core i3 2.0 GHz (4 threads) or equivalent |
| 25-50 | 50 Mbps 10 Kpps | 8 GB | Intel Dual-Core i5 2.0 GHz (4 threads) or equivalent |
| 50-100 | 100 Mbps 20 Kpps | 16 GB | Intel Dual-Core i5 2.20 GHz (4 threads) or equivalent |
| 100-250 | 200 Mbps 40 Kpps | 32 GB | Intel Dual-Core i7 2.0 GHz (4 threads) or equivalent |
| 250-1000 | 500 Mbps 100 Kpps | 64 GB | Intel Dual-Core i7 3.4 GHz (8 threads) or equivalent |
Disk Space
Sensei streams its connections logs to a backend Elastic Search Database. Please spare at least 5MB of disk space per hour per megabit/second throughput.
Do the math. If you’re running a 100 Mbps link (200-300 users) which is quite active during day time and idle rest of the day, this means:
5MByte x 12 hours x 100 Mbps = 6 GB per day.
6 GB x 7 = 42 GB per week.
42 x 4 = 164 GB per month.
As of 0.7.0, Sensei will have Data Retiring feature. So after a configured timespan, existing reports data will be automatically deleted, saving space for more current data.
SHARE your experience
Please share your experience with us. Just shoot an email to: [email protected]
