Hello, everyone. This is my very first post here, so bare with me!
I’m searching for a way to get a rack server to be able to handle 8 x 10Gbps NICs. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of required routing power?
My concern is mainly with the CPU and the PCIe capability to actually process that load.
Any ideas/advices/experiences would be most welcomed!
Cheers
can you provide more info on your case as it´s really depends
any reason it must be single server?
It’s meant to be deployed on a small-scale datacenter, so it must be a rack server. It’ll only function as a router, with no firewall or routing policies at all (we have another router for that that is elsewhere).
It must be a single server due to budget issues.
Thanks for your time 
This sounds to me like you really need a 10gbps Layer 3 switch.
That might actually work, depending on if this budget can be spent on another switch! I’ll keep that in mind, thanks
Hi @MarcoSilva,
If you have a look through the old Vyatta white papers. I think they actually done a similar setup. Or something very close.
This was when Vyatta 5.x was released. And when they initially started selling Vyatta appliances based on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 platform? It was circa 2007/2008/2009.
I would image most recent systems now a days should be able to handle that, given that there is enough network interfaces available on the physical host itself.
I’d suggest the switch. But then that also depends on the cost of a router. And what you’re wanting it to do.
Some switches will do BGP routing, but aren’t capable of handling the entire internet routing table though.
So there are those differences.
If you get 80Gpbs one day, please post a screenshot of your trafic sensor supervision lol
Well, hopefully in the next month or two I should recieve my new 10Gbps switches, they’re Juniper EX4550’s. I will have a few spare 10Gbps cards as well, so ill do a little demo with a bunch of iPerfs.
Hey @MarcoSilva what network specs are you looking to implement? I’ve got a couple of 10Gbe cards I might be able to pool together to get these tests for you.
Hello dtakeshi,
We’ve gone another route due to budget constraints for the current year. However, the purpose of the server would be to act as a router pretty much. No need for anything fancy, I’d just need it to be able to sustain a consistent load of around 10Gbps and peak times of 20Gbps (thinking in the longish term). Other than that, it could eventually serve as a firewall when the other hardware is eventually decommissioned.
So, if you do end up doing some tests, I’d like to know how stable it would be on constant loads of around nearly max capacity of each NIC, just to check stability!
Cheers