Choosing Instance Type and Sizing¶

There are a range of specifications to choose from and this page will help guide you through those choices.

Supported EC2 Instance Types¶

Your instance type will depend on your expected network throughput, as well as the types of services you will provide with your pfSense® appliance.

For general firewall appliances that do not require high throughput, T2 instances are General Purpose Burstable Performance Instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline.

If you are planning to provide advanced services like web proxying, IDS/IPS, or Server Load Balancing, you may consider an instance that provides more CPU and/or faster storage resources, such as m4.large or m4.xlarge.

The following EC2 instance types are supported by Netgate:

t2.nano
t2.micro
t2.small
t2.medium
t2.large
m3.medium
m3.large
m3.xlarge
m4.large
m4.xlarge
c3.large
c3.xlarge
c4.large
c4.xlarge
r4.large
r4.xlarge

Sizing Your EBS Volume¶

The pfSense appliance is only supported with EBS storage. For general purpose firewalls, your storage requirements will typically be small and the default 8GB general purpose SSD volume should be more than enough.

In situations where you may provide web proxying or caching to your users, or other advanced features, you should consider increasing the volume size to something more appropriate, for example 64GB.