10gbe Networking Question

[fireb1adex]

Hi - so I was looking into how to upgrade to 10GbE Lan, and the PCIE cards seem cheap but switches dont!

Does anyone know if I can drop in a 2 port 10GbE card and serve a direct connection to each of my 2 client machines, while using the current 1GbE lan interface to serve up the rest of the network? Unraid would have to passthrough wan access by bridging the ports 3 ways - I am probably asking too much but I only need a decent connection to 2 machines on my network.

[mrbilky]

8 minutes ago, fireb1adex said:

Hi - so I was looking into how to upgrade to 10GbE Lan, and the PCIE cards seem cheap but switches dont!

Does anyone know if I can drop in a 2 port 10GbE card and serve a direct connection to each of my 2 client machines, while using the current 1GbE lan interface to serve up the rest of the network? Unraid would have to passthrough wan access by bridging the ports 3 ways - I am probably asking too much but I only need a decent connection to 2 machines on my network.

I have installed a 2 port mellanox card in my unraid server and one in each of 2 PC's and created a peer to peer network without a switch works great!

[JorgeB]

Yes, you can, and you don't need to bridge the networks, just use different IP segments for both.

[fireb1adex]

Awesome, I guess there's just the issue that both machines internet will go down if there was an issue with the UNRAID machine, but at that stage that will be the least of my worries! Though I guess i could always fall back to the normal LAN if this was the case.

 

Thanks for the reply guys!

[fireb1adex]

On researching this further, it looks like the way to set this up is to continue to use your regular 1gb LAN connections for the internet etc, and supplement this with a direct peer to peer 10Gbe connection to file servers etc, giving a level of failover. Cards are pretty cheap right now so i'll give it a go!