So when i'm perusing costs of 10gig Ethernet equipment i'm finding it a little steeper than i'd like, such that I find myself eyeing other alternatives. Having seen networking cards made that have 4x 1gig ports in a single card for insanely cheap like $40 I found myself wondering if there was a way to take advantage of using them instead? Yes it would be a hassle of extra cabling, and need a notably bigger switch, but perhaps gain failover, and is probably less hassle than my original consideration of 4/8gig Fibrechannel or 10gig SDR Infiniband home networking over short distances for high speed in a small cluster.
The problem is that the only solid information i've found so far suggests that it's something supportable in Windows Server 2012, and various virtual machine hypervisors, but I can't find anything clear about whether it's usable on desktop or workstation grade computers whether Win XP/7/8/10, MacOSX, or Linux flavors. (each of the three runs different software I need for planned workflow) I am considering running virtualization on some computers but not all - conventional desktops right back to 32bit Windows XP would be using certain other tools on the network (my 24bit/96khz audio gear only has XP drivers), served by a SnapRAID Linux (or Windows, but prefer Linux) box wanting faster than 1gig speeds.
Even if true Link Aggregation weren't possible at both sides i'm wondering if I could at least set up something client side using 2-4 channels, even if the workaround is I manually access different drives through each (somehow) so operations like reading from drive NAS_INPUTS_A and writing to drive NAS_OUTPUTS_B would be faster than sharing the same link to the NAS for all use, just like I might use different drives instead of the same drive to process large workstreams to avoid drive thrash.
The problem is that the only solid information i've found so far suggests that it's something supportable in Windows Server 2012, and various virtual machine hypervisors, but I can't find anything clear about whether it's usable on desktop or workstation grade computers whether Win XP/7/8/10, MacOSX, or Linux flavors. (each of the three runs different software I need for planned workflow) I am considering running virtualization on some computers but not all - conventional desktops right back to 32bit Windows XP would be using certain other tools on the network (my 24bit/96khz audio gear only has XP drivers), served by a SnapRAID Linux (or Windows, but prefer Linux) box wanting faster than 1gig speeds.
Even if true Link Aggregation weren't possible at both sides i'm wondering if I could at least set up something client side using 2-4 channels, even if the workaround is I manually access different drives through each (somehow) so operations like reading from drive NAS_INPUTS_A and writing to drive NAS_OUTPUTS_B would be faster than sharing the same link to the NAS for all use, just like I might use different drives instead of the same drive to process large workstreams to avoid drive thrash.