A Review of the Sophos XGS 3100 Security Appliance

We recently purchased a couple of Sophos XGS 3100 security appliances for our network. We had, until recently, been using a pfSense box; a community firewall/router.

pfSense is great but with the growing needs of the department and declining hardware that housed the software, it was time to upgrade.

A Little Background

The switch from pfSense to a dedicated appliance was actually done about a year ago. We had put in a Sophos XG 310 appliance. However, continuous power outages and brownouts resulted in a hardware failure. Thus we had to revert back to pfSense while we waited for our order to come in.

Under normal circumstances, this would have taken a little over a month. However, with the duress of COVID-19, our order arrived 6 months later. That was in March 2022.

Out of the Box

The appliance comes out of the box with the following:

1. Quick Start Guide
2. Safety Instructions
3. 2 long rack mount brackets
4. 2 short rack mount brackets
5. Mirco USB cable
6. RJ45 Ethernet cable
7. Power cable (AU/NZ)

It however does not come with a grounding cable. This can be easily made and I would recommend every device to have one.

The Appliance

The appliance itself has:

1. a multi-function LED display
2. a micro USB port
3. 2 USB3.0 ports
4. 1 USB2.0 port (rear)
5. a COM port (Ethernet)
6. a MGMT port (Ethernet)
7. 4 SFP fiber ports (2 SFP+ (10 Gbps), 2 SFP (1 Gbps))

Physical Installation

Installing the appliance on a rack chassis was straight forward and fact that the device takes only 1U means you don’t need much space. It can be easily installed by 1 person.

Configuration

Configuring the appliance is easy enough. However, the device firmware will be forced to update before you can do any configuration. This might take a few minutes to a few hours depending on your internet speeds.

Defaults

One of the great things about this appliance is the fact that it has default configurations that can be easily applied, and comply with most business requirements. This allows for a quick setup.

High Availability (HA)

Another feature which I found useful is the High Availability (HA) which can be easily set up using a wizard. However, for this option to work you need to have 2 appliances with their firmware update to the same version.

The options for HA are:

• Active-Passive
• Active-Active

The Active-Passive option allows the primary device to handle network traffic while the auxiliary appliance will only be triggered in the event of a fault.

The Active-Active option is when both appliances handle network traffic. Unfortunately, this option does not allow the load balancing feature.

Summary

The Sophos XGS 3100 is an appliance I would recommend. It is ideal for small organizations and has features that make it very easy for the novice and even non-technical personnel to follow.

If you are interested in purchasing this appliance, then you can check Digitec or Daltron.