Sophos XG Network Speed Issue

[n10rd]

Hi I have Sophos XG installed with 2 NICS both setup as VirtIO (I have also tried them as E1000 and RTL 8139) and when I run speedtest my network speed comes in at 65/30, when my true speed on my physical firewall with the same software is 305/30.

I notice in Sophos that I am unable to manually set the NIC speed and then only option is autonegotiate. Can anyone help me get the firewall software running in ProxMOX so that I have my full network speed.

TIA

 

[manu]

Hi
On which OS is based this Sophos XG ? Is that Linux, FreeBSD ?
Also to rule out any Sophos related problem, try to do you network speed test with another VM runniong a standard Linux.

 

[n10rd]

Hi,

I have tracked it down to a FreeBSD issue with KVM. I have a couple of linux VM's on the same hardware as the sophos, pfsense machine and they have no problems with speed. I also setup a machine with the same spec and running vSphere 6.0.2 and installed Sophos XG and pfSense on it and it has no problems with speed.

Regards

 

[manu]

Hi
What was the FreeBSD KVM issue ? Is that related to the FreeBSD VirtIO NIC driver ?

 

[n10rd]

Hi,

yes the issue seems to be related to the FreeBSD NIC Drivers, it doesnt seem to matter which one I choose, I get varying speeds from the 3 drivers and none of them get close to the actual speed.

Regards

 

[manu]

On which Version of FreeBSD is based the Sophos Appliance ( uname -r ) ?
If you use the VirtIO drivers, you might need to disable hardware checksum offload ( see https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/VirtIO_Driver_Support ) I think this is only needed if your appliance use pF.I presume it's possible to change that via a sysctl flag.

I run here a virtualized FreeBSD iscsi daemon and have very good network performance via with VirtIO drivers.

from the FreeBSD host

iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 192.168.15.77 port 5001 connected with 192.168.15.5 port 52588
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 935 MBytes 782 Mbits/sec

ie I get here the full physical thoughtput available