Hello fellow superusers,
I was thinking of installing Pepperspot (which is the dual stack IPv6/IPv4 version of Chillispot, which is essentially an appliance that authenticates people with a captive portal and does some accounting) on a virtual machine to act as a network access controller for a 100 Mb/s gateway. What I'm installing on this virtual appliance is really quite irrelevant. What I would like to know from you folks is what are the hardware requirements for a server to be able to pass 100 Mb/s through a virtual machine? pfSense recommends at least a Pentium 3 and a lot of RAM for 100 Mb/s connection, but how much slowdown should I expect because of virtualization? Should I not be trying this through a virtual machine? Has anyone run a large amount of bandwidth through a virtual machine before?
I've left out my motivation for doing this for the sake of brevity, but let me know if this would help answer my question.
P.S. I apologize if this is in the wrong Stack Exchange, I though it would be most appropriate to post here (instead of Server Fault) because it was related to hardware and did not involve any complex networking.