Protectli Vault FW6A - 6 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Dual Core, AES-NI, Barebone

I think this is a great product! Protectli's level of support is why I purchased this - for my primary pfSense router, not big on "maybes" for this device. But the support afterwards, only self-support at this time, has been nothing short of steller so far. I have not contacted them, but probably will be, as I'm not able to get HDMI to VGA adapters working with any computer monitor, but my 60' Samsung TV loved it (and wife not impressed with bootup sequence on family TV *grin*). So, I think they note this, but I need to find out a bit more about that.Hardware wise, it is SOLID and heavy! Probably the most solid hardware device I've bought in a very long time. with an SSD, I almost feel like I could drop this on the deck and it wouldn't care (yeah, but ...no...) No fan, but temp is consistent with <10degc delta. They have instructions on their website specifically how to setup pfSense and customize it for use with the Protectli. The 6 ports are great, I've got 2 lagged, the one for WAN, one for local management, and not using the 6th one because I didn't think about LAG prior to buying this, so expansion! And SUPER performance with pfSense, CPU with about 2 dozen crazy wired and wireless devices across a dozen VLANs, plenty o' rules, and it barely breaks a sweat and hasn't used 5% of RAM or HDD. NUT works great with my CPU, so USB works just fine, no issues there. I like the possibility of upgrading to securecore, and it already has the encryption built in and just works. I haven't used the console port yet, but bought a cable for it (remember the samsung :)) I think my ONLY POSSIBLE NITPICKY thing is that the gbe port LED's are along the bottom "underneath" the cables - even with it being on a shelf above my head, I still can't glance up to look at their status, unless I walk right up and look underneath each cable. I'm a geek, Iz likez myz blinkz lights! Yeah, helps with troubleshooting too :) Oh back to performance, I'm getting the full 95ish % efficiency out of my Gbe network and the best thing? Comcast "gives me" 200Mb - from all the speed tests, I'm getting 250ish :) 'Loving it

I've been a die-hard fan of Ubiquiti gear and have been using my EdgeRouter Pro-8 for a few years. It's a very reliable router and the configuration learning curve has been fun and challenging at the beginning. As much as I like the EdgeRouter, it has its limitation and something just doesn't seem to work, such as the L2TP and OpenVPN (which is a pain in the behind to configure).A few months earlier, I have been hearing some good things about pfsense so I have started digging up some YouTube videos about it. A few months later, I took the plunge and purchased a Protectli Vault, installed pfsense in there, and I couldn't be any happier. The hardware is not cheap, nor I believe a good quality and prosumer class of router / firewall should be cheap to begin with, but is it worth it? After using it for a few days, I would say YES! I put 32G of DDR4 and a 256 mSATA in there, and the box is able to handle everything, and more than everything that my EdgeRouter was unable to handle. The speed is amazing and it just works! It does not have a fan, so it's completely silent. The temperate is always less than 29 degrees at the highest but could go down to 26 in general. I did the raw ISP test and was able to do have 950mbps down from my 1G connection, did the iperf tests and able to get close to 99% full speed. With pfblocker and suricata running, the WAN speed reduction is no more than 5 to 8% and I am totally fine with it, considering that there's a lot of filtering going on in the background.The box is still in the lab VLAN for now, as I want to migrate my good old configs from my EdgeRouter (firewall rules, VLANs, NAT etc) and make sure they work, before I put it in the production LAN, but I'm quite confident that this box will do a great job.One thing that I wanted to bring up, was that I did return the other Protectli 4-port vault, since the HDMI port could not function properly without resetting the CMOS. I do not have problem with this one. Also, I contacted Protecli support via their email for an inquiry, and within an hour, I got an email back from Brent, their technical support employee with feedback, even with his direct line and asked me to call him back if needed. I did and he picked up the phone right away and helped me out on the spot. TOP NOTCH CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!! I rarely see this level of support nowadays and good luck to get support from Ubiquiti unless you use their forum. Protectli does not just make great products, but their support is amazing. You spend quite a bit on the hardware, but you do know that the company supports what they sell without giving the customers grief.Please give me a thumbs up if you find this helpful. Thank you!

4-stars so far - will likely upgrade to 5 stars if it's stable. So far there is a LOT to like, very sturdy due to heavy heatsink - which provides confidence in it's reliability. After hours of run-time, the temp of the heatsink stays the same. The power adapter is also high quality - it doesn't even get warm.Everything included worked well to get 16GB of ram and a 1TB SATA SSD installed. No 'quirks' with BIOS settings, it just seems to work well and just hope that it will be reliable.I did get ESXi 6.5U1 installed after a few hours of hair-pulling - but if you have trouble search for ESXi customizer powershell script. Have to do a few things to get the ISO you need with the ne1000 drivers disabled (VMWare loads that driver but it doesn't support the specific intel nics on this board) so that forces vmware to load the e1000 drivers which include support for these nics.