TL,DR: 10Gb SFF on a RB2011 - yay or nay?
Hello!
I’m setting up a Dell R710 running a bunch of VMs for various uses (Plex, NAS, a high sample rate ADC for SDR, etc) and it has four 1Gb network ports. I’m expecting a handful of PCs, some smart phones, and consoles as the likely clients. The internet uplink is 100/40, so that’s not likely to be a problem for bandwidth. The ADC can sample to around 80MS/s@16bit (over 1Gb/s - it saturates a USB3 connection if set up poorly). The rest I assume is fine on GbE - everything else in the house is on Gb ports (except the printer… 100Mb is fine for that).
Rather than connect multiple ports to the router and manually splitting the I/O among VMs, I was wondering the usefulness of connecting the server via 10Gb SFF (with a matching card in the server). The two would be located close together (in the same rack, most likely) so distance isn’t a problem.
I’m not planning on running a firewall or VPN on the RB2011 (it’ll be on the R710) but do want to have a script that allows internet access and a minimal firewall if the server is down (eg. default route via 710, if 710 is down then route directly). I’ll worry about this part later, once I get the 710 working. The 2011 will handle DHCP, and be the router for the network (port forwarding, hairpin routing, etc).