Intel X520-SR2,X520-DA2 or X710 and XL710?

General questions
1

Hi,

i think to use vyos to build a router with bgp…etc service.

i search artilces,
old vyos 1.1.8 can not work with X710,
and 1.2 can work well on it.

  1. i hope it can work at at least 3-5 years well,
    im not sure if X520 can be supported well so long time,
    with your experience or understanding,
    is it fine to use X520 ?

  2. X520 has X520-DA2 and X520-SR2,
    can i use the same transceiver on both card well ?
    and do you recommend to buy X520-DA2 or X520-SR2 ?

  3. some site offer 4 ports on one NIC,
    such as fs.com 's Intel XL710-BM1,
    is fine to use such 4 ports card ?
    or it is better to use two cards and each one card has 2 ports ?
    or no difference ?

thanks

2

You should better ask this question to equipment sellers.

If you use a multiprocessor system, then 2 cards will be preferable, because each socket will process its own card. If you have 1 socket, it not matter.

3

If you are using Intel 700-series NICs, be aware that they are very fragile with regards the combination of (kernel_version,driver_version,firmware_version).

Check what kernel and kernel driver you are running and then make sure you have updated the NVM on the card to run something which is compatible. Otherwise you will find mysterious bugs happen after some time (e.g. card stops forwarding packets, or packet loss which goes away when you start running tcpdump).

I have had reasonable success looking at what DPDK recommend: 27. I40E Poll Mode Driver — Data Plane Development Kit 23.03.0 documentation

4

Hi, maznu

but if i install vyos on hardware directly instead of vm,will it still have so much issue ?

thanks

5

Our latest experience with i40e wasn’t good (and we run VyOS on bare metal):

Thanks to @c-po for the build with in-Linux stock kernel drivers!