Hello everyone,
I still consider myself relatively new to networking, despite what I've been dabbling in thus far between my home setup and our small business's configuration. Primarily one of my friends helped get me into the used enterprise gear market for various needs, and to be quite honest I really wouldn't want to give that up!
So my experience with networking has mostly consisted of running my own networking cable throughout the home and office, and planning out where I need to go with it. Of course setting up the patch panels and connecting everything to the network switch. My first managed network switch is my Cisco units, then the Blade switches.
Since I'm finally getting ready to explore 10gbe networking, I've explored my options and had stumbled upon this thread which interested me into getting the Quanta LB6M, which sounded like the perfect solution.
However, I feel this is where I'm getting myself sent out into the battlefield, so to speak. My whole system is also my learning tool, but there's a lot I'm not quite understanding and/or I may not be configuring correctly.
I have read through quite a few pages, but not all the pages of this thread since there's so much to take in, on top of everyone's needs/uses are going to vary.
So I'm going to start with listing what I have currently both at home and our business.
Home:
Servers:
- 1u Supermicro Mini ITX Xeon-D Server - PfSense Router (This hardware was originally purchased to be used as a FreeNAS server, but plans changed for this as soon as I got my hands on a nice 2u chassis.)
- 2u Dell PowerEdge R710 - ESXi
- 2u Supermicro 12 x 3.5" bay chassis - FreeNAS (Primary)
- 2u Supermicro 12 x 3.5" bay chassis - Spare / Future Expansion
- 1u Dell PowerEdge R410 - FreeNAS (Secondary Backup - For more important data that's stored on the primary FreeNAS)
Network Switches:
- Cisco Catalyst 4948 (Currently the primary switch)
- Cisco SG300-10PP (PoE switch for the IP cameras and two Ubiquiti APs)
- Blade G8000 with two SFP+ modules (Not in use right now.)
- Quanta LB6M (Not in use right now.)
Office:
Servers:
- 2u Dell PowerEdge R720xd - ESXi
- 1u Dell PowerEdge R410 - PfSense Router
Network Switches:
- Blade G8000 with two SFP+ modules (Primary)
- Quanta LB6M (Not in use right now.)
So at home, I'm utilizing dual WAN on the PfSense Router since we have two ISPs on hand, a faster connection from a local ISP and a DSL connection for backup.
Currently on LAN from there goes to the first interface port on my Cisco Catalyst 4948. Then everything else connects to this same switch. I've even managed to configure my FreeNAS box to utilize LACP with this recently. Though I did that through the GUI that Cisco provides for management.
Otherwise I have little to no experience with CLI for the network switches, though probably only the basics like maybe just assigning VLANs.
Right now I'm not using VLANs to separate anything within the network. Primarily right now I just have the FreeNAS be configured for us to have our own shares, plus a separate one for the media. Which that is accessed by Emby running on Ubuntu under a VM on my Dell R710. I plan to run more on ESXi later.
Though the primary goal with the Quanta LB6M is to upgrade actual servers to utilizing 10GbE. I want to get the ESXi and FreeNAS box on 10GbE. Then possibly have the LB6M provide my computer and one or both of mom's computers 10GbE as well.
Effectively the same/similar idea is to be done at the office as well, where the LB6M will provide the server and some office workstations 10GbE. At the office I originally ran shielded Cat6A cabling for preparing for 10GbE, but after seeing the costs of SFP+ modules that'd provide 10GBASE-T or 10GBASE-T switches I figured the LB6M would provide the best value. I don't mind running OM3 fiber cable.
So that brings me to what I'm working with right now. So far only one OM3 cable arrived for me to try the LB6M out with. I stuck an Intel X520-DA2 into my R710 and connected the OM3 cable between the two. Both ends using the Cisco FET-10G 10-2566-02 transceivers.
Then I plugged one of the 1GbE ports on the Quanta into my Cisco switch and the serial console cable to a laptop. Thus far I've managed to see that the Quanta shows to show a link on both, and identifying the link as up on both interface 0/1 and 0/27. "Show network" even gives me a DHCP given IP address within the console. Though I'm not sure what else to really do here.
ESXi on the R710 recognizes that I've added the Intel X520-DA2, and and with the one transceiver plugged in it also shows up as an interface I can add. Though it shows the link to be down. Despite the LED on the card showing some form of activity along with the indication on the Quanta. Thus no IP received from the DHCP server either.
The other OM3 cables should arrive today so I should be able to expand my test platform to being able to tap off the Blade G8000.
A lot of how-tos I've been reading around keep showing various VLAN configurations on this switch, which I hadn't planned to be using on this switch. Which might be a no-no, I'm not sure as I'm trying to learn how configure my whole network setup. So far with the 1GbE side, it's relatively easy since it's been plug-n-play experience or a few minor tweaks within the Cisco GUI to take care of what I needed it to. Of course, if the Quanta was that easy, it wouldn't be a good learning tool for me, now would it?
So what do I really need to do with the Quanta LB6M as far as configuration? I've never configured SFP+ interfaces before, so I don't know if there are any special requirements needed to get it to work with another component in a system.
The idea is to use the Blade G8000's SFP+ interfaces with the Quanta so the 1GbE switch has high speed traffic to the 10GbE switch that will handle the higher speed traffic for the servers and certain machines.
I've read the article that STH has on using the LB6M, but I'm not really understanding what OSPF is, or other options, or certain configuration with what's going on there, since it looks like it's going on with different subnets.
Anyway, thank you guys in advance for your time, I hope I've provided enough information to at least get the idea out on what I'm wanting to do here.