Smoothwall on Hyper-V

[jamesfed]

Hi all,

 

We've been looking at internet filtering options for the past few weeks and have been mainly looking at Forefront TMG (our MS licensing makes it the most cost efficient for the features we need and we can run it on hardware that we select (always something I am keen on)).

 

However....we are still waiting on our LA to see if they will consider TMG as something suitable, as such we are looking at the other options including Smoothwall.

 

Currently almost all our servers run inside VMs on Hyper-V R2 and I was wondering if there was a definitive answer as to if Smoothwall Web Filter would run inside Hyper-V with no big issues.

 

I have seen a few other posts about it on the site however I have not as yet found a specific answer.

 

VMWare is out of the options simply on the way I don’t like it and while Citrix Xen Server is fine by me (our current VDI setup runs on Xen) I would prefer to keep all the server OSes on Hyper-V.

 

Thanks,

James

[riffleman]

Smoothwall will work on Hyper-V, but they have not yet achieved validation from Microsoft. Smoothwall expect to be validated very soon though.

[tom_newton]

Thanks riffleman - but I don't want to raise the expectations here - right now I would class smoothie on Hyper-V as a "curiosity" not suited for production use. Unfortunately we can't get the performance right - partly due to lack of linux support from the guys at microsoft, partly due to an older kernel. We *hope* to have something out before summer that might work to a decent level.

 

Worth noting that web filtering is a heavy duty task though, and not always a suitable candidate for virtualising as it has a nasty habit of wanting all your resource

[skell]

Just do what we do - slap SmoothWall on an oldish spare server. We're heavily virtualised here and we weren't too keen on having to put SmoothWall on it's own server initially.

 

However, it runs great on its own box and even if the guys at SmoothWall do managed to navigate the Microsoft minefield and get it working on Hyper-V, we don't have any plans to switch it to a virtualised environment.

[jamesfed]

Thanks riffleman - but I don't want to raise the expectations here - right now I would class smoothie on Hyper-V as a "curiosity" not suited for production use. Unfortunately we can't get the performance right - partly due to lack of linux support from the guys at microsoft, partly due to an older kernel. We *hope* to have something out before summer that might work to a decent level.

 

Worth noting that web filtering is a heavy duty task though, and not always a suitable candidate for virtualising as it has a nasty habit of wanting all your resource

 

Cheers for that - how does it run on XenServer?

 

I'd hope with 4x15k SAS 6Gb drives and a 8 core processor resources shouldn't be an issue - the only other thing that it would be running side by side with would be our internal web server (a few local sites nothing like Sharepoint) and a smattering of TMG to handle direct access and VPN.

[tom_newton]

Xen isn't *officially* supported but it has been seen to work ok as long as it is full virtualisation (as opposed to para-).

[jamesfed]

Xen isn't *officially* supported but it has been seen to work ok as long as it is full virtualisation (as opposed to para-).

 

That might be our option then - I've sent a thing through on your site to get a trial version and I'll give it a go on Xen.

 

Thanks!

James

[riffleman]

Thanks riffleman - but I don't want to raise the expectations here - right now I would class smoothie on Hyper-V as a "curiosity" not suited for production use. Unfortunately we can't get the performance right - partly due to lack of linux support from the guys at microsoft, partly due to an older kernel. We *hope* to have something out before summer that might work to a decent level.

 

Sorry for stealing your thunder Tom. I was at the recent Durham Network Managers' meeting where Smoothwall was demo'ed and thought you were a lot closer to getting a Hyper-V solution from what was said there.

[jamesfed]

Hi all,

 

Just further to my previous thing on Hyper-V - we've got the Smoothwall trial installed inside virtual box - everything seems to be running fine but naturaly I don't want to point everyone at a VM running on my desktop to see how well it would run in our enviroment.

As such does anyone know if it'll run inside VirtualBox ok in production? Again I guess its not supported (like XenServer if I understand corrently) but if it runs ok then we might end up with a Server 2008 R2 machine with Hyper-V on - a TMG server running inside a Hyper-V VM and then virtualbox running (Virtualbox is accualy how we started out with VMs here) the Smoothwall server.

 

I know that it can be quite an intensive thing running services like this at the same time but it won't be a problem for the server that we are looking at running it all on.

 

Thanks!

James

[tom_newton]

We run all our test gear on virtualbox here in Leeds (as it's easier than VMware to stick on straight ubuntu) - but I don't know if there's any potential trouble with performance. Can't see why there should be.

[jamesfed]

We run all our test gear on virtualbox here in Leeds (as it's easier than VMware to stick on straight ubuntu) - but I don't know if there's any potential trouble with performance. Can't see why there should be.

 

That sounds pretty good infact - if anyone has any ideas on performance then this would probably make our ideal setup.

 

Thanks!