Nethserver Firewall Load Capability

Good Day everyone, i am planning to redo my network with Nethserver 7. Planning on using it for DHCP, DNS, Firewall, Bandwidth Monitor, traffic Shaping, vpn and possibly also gonna try Active directory.

My main goal is to route all my lan traffic through my firewall by using port based vlans on my managed Switch blocking access between each users, as opposed to switches routing. I am sure this will put a heavy load on the firewall. I was wondering what hardware specifications i would need to accomplish this. the users will be accessing one database application from my db server. I have approximately 50 users and my hardware specs are as follows.

Dell Poweredge 2950 Server

  • 6 x 200gb SAS drives in raid
  • 2 x quad core processor @ 2.66 Ghz Per core
  • 32 GB DDR2 Ram

Do you think this will handle the network traffic for users sharing files/accessing database etc. Or would i be better off using my switches to do the routing.

With such an hw you can manage 500 users…

Would I be able to achieve Gigabit speeds between my user network and my server network though, that is my real fear. Afraid to sacrifice speed for added security of port based vlan. If there is a better route i would be happy to hear your feedback also. This is my first attempt at vlan and I am only going this route based on my limited knowledge from what i have researched.

Thanks in advance