With various network loads and syslog/firewall rules being sent to the ELK stack we really never hit any resource ceilings. From our experience with ELK in production environments we know that ELK is a RAM hog but on a small home network we feel like we can get away with 4GB of RAM to start. Elastic doesn’t really publish a very specific hardware guide and that’s because ELK is so flexible there really is no standard use.

The real worry we had was how it would do with ELK. We installed ESXi, pfSense and ELK with very little issues and gave pfSense 1GB of RAM and ELK 4GB to start. This is a great little unit! The build quality is very solid, complete with heatsink integrated metal case which makes this totally silent server. We recommend if someone was planning on using this as an ESXi box to go with 16GB of RAM right off the bat. As you’ll see later we started to need a bit more RAM. We weren’t planning on getting too crazy with the i3 so we only installed 8GB initially. Brent stated that RAM was important and recommended using Crucial 8GB Single DDR4 2133 Memory and we went with his suggestion. We switched from spinning disk to a KingSpec 64GB mSATA in our production deployment. Of a note, an mSATA is the preferable option due to the performance boost but also because of the heat that a spinning disk creates as well.

6x Intel 82583V 1000M LAN, support for Wake On LANįor hardware, we installed a 500GB 5200RPM 2.5″ SATA hard drive laying around.

For the purposes of this review we’ll be focusing only on the i3 box. All other specs listed below are the same across both devices.

One Kaby Lake Intel i3 7100U and one Intel Kaby Lake 3865U. Thanks Brent!īrent sent two barebone devices which are both identical with the exception of chipset. That lands us here today with Protecli graciously providing the Hackmethod team with some hardware to test out. We were informed that they were working on a new line of products due for release in a few months and wanted to know if we would like to get our hands on one for review. For full disclosure, we reached out to Brent at Protecli and asked when/if they would have hardware to support the AES-NI requirement. This requires chipsets that support AES-NI and even though pfSense 2.4 isn’t out yet we at Hackmethod always like to future proof as much as possible. We have been in the market for something like this for a few months and while researching several products we stumbled across a CPU requirement for pfSense version 2.5. Homelabbers rejoice! In this review we are welcoming the Protectli 6 Port Vault to the home security hardware market.

Protectli vault fw4b