Word of caution to anyone thinking of using this for pfsense: the realtek 2.5G drivers are not included in the pfsense image and have to be installed manually. A real pain if you don't have easy access to another freebsd machine.
In my experience Realtek network cards often leave a lot to be desired when used in a routing / firewalling / always on environment. I specifically make sure NICs are Intel based when configuring systems.
For the 2.5 Gbe NICs, apparently the Intel ones were also shit. They went through four revisions of I225-V to fix some issues. The latest intel one is I226-V which incorporates the previous fixes.
