Quanta LB6M (10GbE) -- Discussion
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Definitely need to buy one of those cables... I was able to get connected back to it however since I had set it to network mode DHCP. I just powered the switch on/ off and I had access again on a different port. Thank goodness! This thread has been amazing! I actually set up a 4 port LAG which trunks VLANs 101,102,103 plus the default 1. WOOT! STH for the win.
Yeah those cables are too cheap not to have one. Literally $1 6FT Cisco Console Cable RJ45 to DB9 FOR CISCO SWITCH ROUTER -SHIP OUT SAME DAY assuming you have a serial port on your computer.
If you don't have a serial port, I suggest the TU-S9 available from Amazon for $7.65, and it is prime if you are a prime user. I have purchased about 200 of these for the engineers at work. If you are a windows person, the main issue you will have with the Tu-s9 is that is can change serial ports (com1, com2, etc). It will tend to stay at the same place for some users, and others see it change almost every time they use it. I think it depends on how many other things you connect to with usb. All of the serial to usb converts do this. To find it's com number on windows 7, go to your start button, then to devices and printers, and scroll to the bottom and you will see it. On windows 10 it is settings> devices, bluetooth, printers>connected devices> and it will show up as a prolific USB to serial com port (comX).
Once you know the com port number, you can use putty. Don't download putty from a "free downloads" site, as they will pack it with a malware payload or have an old version. Putty is a term program that can do telnet, serial, ssh, rlogin. use serial, your assigned com number, 9600. You can customize putty, and don't forget to save your settings so they are easy to use again. Putty is what I use as a ssh client into all of my other systems.
Sorry if you already know all of this, but I work with a team of router engineers, and every once in a while a new engineer will be having trouble, and he will confide in me that he is having difficulty with this "proprietary" rs232 stuff... I'm an old guy that has been using rs232 since 1978, and back then rs232 was used like Ethernet is used today. So I have been making rs232 cables since before many of you were born, probably. The point is, rs232 is old, and if you aren't old, you may have never seen it.
I'm a Cisco hack, and I started one of the first ISP's in 1987, and ran it for 20 years, and I've designed routers and IOT devices, and I manage a lab that designs and supports one of the largest deployed routers on the planet... So while I'm not the end-all expert, I can sometimes be helpful. I have a Cisco 4948 (and a number of other cisco models) in my home lab, and the two 10g ports on it were not enough... So like the rest of you here, I'm here for the scoop on the LB6M. My $350 LB6M has not arrived yet, but I hope to use it to provide high speed networking to my home FreeNAS file servers, and the workstations and VMware servers that will use it for bulk storage. I use VLANs and layer 3 devices extensively, and I'm hoping the lb6m will give me what I need. I would rather have a Cisco, but they cost too much.
I see from elsewhere in the thread that I paid too much for my lb6m... Oh Well...
Once you know the com port number, you can use putty. Don't download putty from a "free downloads" site, as they will pack it with a malware payload or have an old version. Putty is a term program that can do telnet, serial, ssh, rlogin. use serial, your assigned com number, 9600. You can customize putty, and don't forget to save your settings so they are easy to use again. Putty is what I use as a ssh client into all of my other systems.
Sorry if you already know all of this, but I work with a team of router engineers, and every once in a while a new engineer will be having trouble, and he will confide in me that he is having difficulty with this "proprietary" rs232 stuff... I'm an old guy that has been using rs232 since 1978, and back then rs232 was used like Ethernet is used today. So I have been making rs232 cables since before many of you were born, probably. The point is, rs232 is old, and if you aren't old, you may have never seen it.
I'm a Cisco hack, and I started one of the first ISP's in 1987, and ran it for 20 years, and I've designed routers and IOT devices, and I manage a lab that designs and supports one of the largest deployed routers on the planet... So while I'm not the end-all expert, I can sometimes be helpful. I have a Cisco 4948 (and a number of other cisco models) in my home lab, and the two 10g ports on it were not enough... So like the rest of you here, I'm here for the scoop on the LB6M. My $350 LB6M has not arrived yet, but I hope to use it to provide high speed networking to my home FreeNAS file servers, and the workstations and VMware servers that will use it for bulk storage. I use VLANs and layer 3 devices extensively, and I'm hoping the lb6m will give me what I need. I would rather have a Cisco, but they cost too much.
I see from elsewhere in the thread that I paid too much for my lb6m... Oh Well...
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Meh. I paid $350 a few months back. Still a steal for a really decent high speed switch. I've been buying them a putting them in redundant pairs. They do exactly what I need them to do.
Buying them in pairs? How many do you need? Would love to hear about your infrastructure. Also, where are you housing these suckers as they are loud too!
Thank you! I actually just ordered one as a single dollar for that level of convenience if I screw up the switch. Again, THANK YOU for the recommendation.
We've been installing them in LOTS of installs, many hyperconverged VMware environments. So backend iSCSI / VMotion mostly. Basically a self-insured switch policy.
So what kind of performance do you see? Have you done any Bonnie++ benchmarks?
I have a FreeNAS box that I built a year ago, and it has a bunch of NFS mounts for vmware and daily software build storage. I recently added a pair of 10g ports feeding a couple of Cisco 6509 switches, pushing iSCSI to VMware systems. In a benchmark I ran the other day, I was seeing 715MB/s writes and 299MB/s reads, and iops averaging around 12,000. The existing loads on the SAN are obviously light, and the filesystem is only 1/4th full, so the benchmark system is the only stress point, and was mainly just testing the ram based ARC, so the benchmark wasn't testing the filesystem out to the spindle. I plan to do some more extensive benchmarking once I have 4 of my VMware servers on 10g iSCSI... I figure I can loop the benchmarks on 2 vm's at a time on each server, and with 8 sets of benchmarks running, as some scripts also fill the disk with random size files, I should be able to get an idea of how the unit will hold up if I let it fill up with data while under a load. I can also tune the ARC down in size to force the I/O load all the way to the spindles, but in MY real world there will never be that much load.
Really, I just want to be able to have a burst of activity every once in a while without saturating the NAS system... and that is pretty much what the benchmark tests for.
I'm told I made a critical error using RaidZ3 instead of striped mirrors, but the design goal is modest performance and maximum reliability, so the FreeNAS guys think I'm being stupid...
Fynny thing, when people act like I'm stupid, and say what I'm talking about is impossible... Like in 1990 I was told it was /impossible/ to sell ISP services to the general public because of the amount of support required... And the person that told me that knew I had been doing it for 3 years by then. And he was a published internet expert. I love it when people tell me to my face that the thing I am successfully demonstrating is impossible.
Perhaps I *should* scream like Godzilla...
I tried this on one of my Cisco 6509's, using Cisco SFP's, and they did *nothing*. I honestly don't think that is a valid thing to do. I was trying this because I needed to feed 1G fiber to a GPON router. They originally asked for 10G, so that is what I was expecting, and when the 10G wasn't working, I looked at his SFP, and saw it was only a 1g SFP... so we tried every model of 1g sfp in the 6509 10g SFP+ ports, and failed to get anything to work.
In my work lab, I don't have a lot of SFP ports, except on my impairment generator and DSLAMs, but on both of those I'm using copper SFP's as I don't have a valid application for 1G fiber ethernet, except where I feed ethernet cables into my RF chamber.... Most of my switches only have SFP+. Obviously I use fiber for most of the 10G connections, but I do have a few twinnax copper 10g cables for things physically close to the switches.
I suspect we will need dual rate SFP+ modules to even attempt 1G.
10G/1G Dual Rate (10GBASE-SR and 1000BASE-SX) 400m Multimode Datacom SFP+ Optical Transceiver | Finisar Corporation
10G/1G Dual Rate (10GBASE-SR and 1000BASE-SX) 400m Multimode Datacom SFP+ Optical Transceiver | Finisar Corporation
But you probably used it longer...doesnt matter what others paid, if you felt like you got a good deal, be happy.. Some people pay 3 or 4 times more to fly in the next seat on an airplane, as they booked it to early or too late for that flight, other flights it is good to buy late if there a lots of empty seats. Life is full of these experiences. You could have waited and perhaps caused more frustration by missing out..LOL..
A while back in this thread, I posted a rather long explanation about how speed conversion won't happen in SFP/SFP+ modules (other than in some GbE TX modules). It is probably worth a re-read.
The dual speed 1/10 optics simply report that they support both speeds. The hardware in the switch also needs to support both speeds. And even if that is the case, there's no guarantee that dual-speed optics will work - for example, I have an Dell 8024 switch that supports both SFP and SFP+, but it will not work with a dual-speed optic part, even a genuine Dell one for a different model of switch.
Hello all! I recently just got my quanta lb6m switch in (like, an hour ago), and it works great so far. I can not login to the switch however with the admin and blank password combo. Is there a way to reset the switch? I can telnet to it and access a web interface.
If you have a web interface (GUI) on a LB6M then there are going to be a lot of people looking for a dump from yours.
Well crap. Turns out I was telnetting to the wrong IP. One should not buy multiple switches and put them on the network at the same time. That is my bad. I managed to get in.
(FASTPATH Routing) #show version
Switch: 1
System Description............................. Quanta LB6M, 1.2.0.14, Linux
2.6.21.7
(FASTPATH Routing) #show bootvar
Image Descriptions
active :
backup :
Images currently available on Flash
--------------------------------------------------------------------
unit active backup current-active next-active
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1 1.2.0.14 1.0.0.17 1.2.0.14 1.2.0.14
How does LACP work for everyone? Is it worth it? And Ive read on this thread that jumbo frames are hit or miss. Is it really worth it to have jumbo frames with 10gb?
(FASTPATH Routing) #show version
Switch: 1
System Description............................. Quanta LB6M, 1.2.0.14, Linux
2.6.21.7
(FASTPATH Routing) #show bootvar
Image Descriptions
active :
backup :
Images currently available on Flash
--------------------------------------------------------------------
unit active backup current-active next-active
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1 1.2.0.14 1.0.0.17 1.2.0.14 1.2.0.14
How does LACP work for everyone? Is it worth it? And Ive read on this thread that jumbo frames are hit or miss. Is it really worth it to have jumbo frames with 10gb?
It depends on your use case. A single session (flow of packets) is still going to be limited to the speed of a port. You need to have multiple sessions in order to get any benefit from LACP. And you need to select a balancing algorithm (probably called hashing-mode on the LB6M) that does the best job of distributing your sessions among the ports that make up the LACP bundle.
LACP is normally used between switches and in other backbone-type applications, rather than between end nodes and the switch, for the above reasons.
This is another "it depends". Jumbo frames were designed to reduce the CPU load on end node systems. Modern network adapters and operating systems have a number of features to improve efficiency, even on standard-size packets. I'd suggest testing your actual throughput without jumbo frames and see what you get. Using iperf, I can get single-thread performance at wire speed (9.89Gbit/sec on a 10GbE link). If you need to use multiple iperf threads to get wire speed, you may benefit from enabling jumbo frames.
Most protocols should correctly handle the case of a session between a system configured for jumbo frames and one that isn't. Where people tend to run into problems is where both end nodes are configured for jumbo frames, but something on the path between those two nodes doesn't support jumbo frames. This results in packets being "dropped on the floor".
I see, that was what I was going to do between my gigabit switch with 10gb ports and the LB6M with LACP. Would really help with the connections between the SANs / HyperV and the desktops.
I can get about 300 - 400 MBps with no jumbo frames, so I think I will enable it to see what I get then.
I can get about 300 - 400 MBps with no jumbo frames, so I think I will enable it to see what I get then.
Hello! I'm having a bit of a problem fiddling around with the management ports.
Is there any way to turn one of the management ports into a switchable Ethernet port? Also, do you SSH into the switch on the management port? I've tried configuring SSH by using the network parms command on page 7 but I can't seem to ping (much less SSH into) the configured IP from a machine connected to the same subnet set. From the arp cache of the subnet I see that the MAC address (X:X:X:X:1B:48) pointing to the configured IP is different from that showing under #show network (X:X:X:X:1B:47) OR #show mac-addr-table. Where exactly should I be plugging the cable to?
Also, to be noted is that the default VLAN has an IP on a different subnet (192.168.2.1). Is this a problem?
Thanks in advance!
Is there any way to turn one of the management ports into a switchable Ethernet port? Also, do you SSH into the switch on the management port? I've tried configuring SSH by using the network parms command on page 7 but I can't seem to ping (much less SSH into) the configured IP from a machine connected to the same subnet set. From the arp cache of the subnet I see that the MAC address (X:X:X:X:1B:48) pointing to the configured IP is different from that showing under #show network (X:X:X:X:1B:47) OR #show mac-addr-table. Where exactly should I be plugging the cable to?
Also, to be noted is that the default VLAN has an IP on a different subnet (192.168.2.1). Is this a problem?
Thanks in advance!