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Boost Performance SMA 500v

TomCTomC Newbie ✭
edited December 2020 in Secure Mobile Access Appliances

Hi,

I'm considering to replace an SRA 4600 with an SMA 500v appliance as the SRA suffers from performance.

In the specifications of the SMA 500v is the SSL throughput listed as 186 Mbps with 1 CPU and 2 GB of memory.

Will performance boost if added more CPU's and RAM, or is it capped in the software? I see there is also an SMA 8200v with higher performance, this does me think the 500v is software-limited.

Does anybody has experience with this?


Thanks!

Category: Secure Mobile Access Appliances
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  • CORRECT ANSWER
    TomCTomC Newbie ✭
    Answer ✓

    Thanks for the answers. I'll put it to the test and bought the 500v. I'm confident it will perform well considering the difference in CPU power.


    rgds,

    Tom

Answers

  • BWCBWC Cybersecurity Overlord ✭✭✭

    Hi @TomC

    I'am running a SMA 500v with 2 Cores and 4 GB of RAM. There is no Core Usage monitoring, therefore I cannot tell if you all cores are properly used, but it's linux based and I guess it'll probably be. Depending on your CPU you'll have much more power compared to the Intel Celeron (or was it Atom?) in the SRA and even the SMA 410 (Atom based).

    Memory-wise I can't tell if more than 4 GB makes sense, I would need to check if it's a 32 or 64 bit installation, if you're interessted I can hunt through the filesystem.

    I would love to run a top on a SMA, but it's sealed without shell access.

    SMA 8200v is a total different product, it's Aventail based and not 100% comparable to it's smaller sibling.

    --Michael@BWC

  • TomCTomC Newbie ✭

    Hi @BWC,

    Thanks for this swift answer!

    The SMA 500v is indeed only 32 bit, so 4 GB would indeed be the maximum.

    The SRA is a 1.66 Ghz 2-core Atom CPU and no hardware acceleration so running it on any higher cpu should already be better I suppose. Just wondering if adding more cpu's would also uplift the ssl throughput so user don't complain about the sometimes degraded speed and stability. Some benchmarks woulde be interesting.


    Thanks,

    Tom

  • BWCBWC Cybersecurity Overlord ✭✭✭

    Hi @TomC

    I'am running just a small shop, my largest SMA 500v deployments are between 30-50 users concurrently, no complains so far. CPU-wise I think they are using some new Xeons, but even a SMA 400 is doing ok.

    Maybe you should crank up an Eval-License for a SMA 500v and give it a test in your environment, checking with your load. If you stick with the 9.x branch your users probably wouldn't even recognize. Version 10.x is a whole other story.

    --Michael@BWC

  • MasterRoshiMasterRoshi Moderator

    @TomC, if you are interested in a 500v trial, please reach out to your account manager at SonicWall to facilitate it. Depending on the underlying hardware, the 500v can be faster than the SRA, even though it is 32 bit, it can use PAE so its possible to use more than 4GB but usually you don't need to. I would also suggest assigning a minimum of 2 CPU/4GB.

  • SonicAdmin80SonicAdmin80 Cybersecurity Overlord ✭✭✭

    According to the data sheet the 500v doesn’t have SSL acceleration while the 8200v does. Sounds like it could be deliberately made to not support cpu crypto acceleration to differentiate it from other models. It could be quite fast anyway if the cpu has a high clock speed, but I still recommended the 410 to a customer on my previous case. I don’t have proper hardware now to run any tests so can’t say for sure how limited it is.

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