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X1052 Specs and Transceiver compatibility
Hiya,
My first question.
We're considering purchasing a few Dell X1052's so we can set up a 10GE backbone in our business. However, we're not sure which cables we need. I was looking at the SonicWALL documentation and they have a guide on compatible products: https://support.sonicwall.com/kb/sw8983
The backbone would also connect to Dell servers at 10GE, which have Intel 10G 2P X52 cards in them.
So we're looking to see which transceivers we need to connect between buildings and to the servers. The buildings are very close to each other, so SR-Lite or SR transceivers would be fine. We just don't know much about whether they need to be active or passive cables or which brands are compatible or any other specs we need to make sure we have.
Any help greatly appreciated!
Cheers,
Chris
Dev Mgr
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April 25th, 2017 19:00
On the X1052, the 10Gbit ports should be used as uplink ports (to a 10Gbit switch, another similar switch, or maybe your SonicWall router/firewall), so there's enough bandwidth between the switches. You should not use 'uplink' ports to connect servers or so to, as their data transfers could tank the overall performance of the switch when they try to push data at 10Gbit, but the switch can only send it to the destination at 1Gbit (so the switch buffer typically ends up filling up quick and the performance of the switch tanks).
A 10Gbit switch is a switch that can run 10Gbit or faster on every port (other than maybe the out-of-band management port if it has one).
What is your 10Gbit backbone switch? Some switches are hard locked in regards to which brand SFP+ modules they'll accept.
If you are running cables from one building to the next, will you be running optical cables, or CAT6a/CAT7 type cables? The reason I ask if that you talk about transceivers, which are typically for optical cables, but then you talk about active and passive cables, which is more typical for DAC/Twin-Ax cables, which can replace optical transceivers, but are usually used for shorter distances.
chalmo5
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May 3rd, 2017 06:00
Thank you for replying to me. We were planning to connect the X1052 to our hyper-visor servers via 10GE with the Intel 10G 2P X52 cards. Hyper-V would then be an end switch on each of the hyper-visors. However, I'm not sure about the VM servers on the hyper-visors connecting to this switch then, whether that would be at 10GE or at 1GE. I'll take a look into that and whether the servers would tank the connection or not, I guess it's down to how hyper-v handles this?... The hyper-visors run most of the infrastructure servers. This would be our first 10GE switching efforts, so we don't have anything in there are the moment. All our switches are older NetGears which don't support the 10GE.
I would like to get the SonicWALLs connected too, but they're in another building which is currently connected by CAT6A. So... I was wanting to work out what cables I had to / could use, and if I needed to go to fibre, which we can do, no probs. I'm not too familiar with how to do this. So, I'm looking to get an understanding of what and how I should be connecting these boxes. The cheaper solution is the more recommendable from the trying it out point of view. We had a single cable recommended for £400 which was fibre and SonicWALL approved.