Quad Port Network Cards

Centronix

Centronix

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Does anyone have an idea where one can get reasonably priced (cheap) quad port network cards? These things seem to go for R3k+. There's a specific one I'd love to own but they don't sell it anywhere - except ebay. It's the D-Link 580TX
 
They are used primarily in servers so you can expect to pay a fairly large amount for one.

The best quality and most compatible is probably Intel PRO/1000 PT quad port server adapter as you said however, it costs ~R2K (From eBay shipped to SA)
 
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Gnome said:
They are used primarily in servers so you can expect to pay a fairly large amount for one.

The best quality and most compatible is probably Intel PRO/1000 PT quad port server adapter as you said however, it costs ~R3K.
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That kinda sucks. I'm building a home server and cisco lab at home and I need to buy 3 of these eish :(
 
I'll run vmware esxi and run multiple virtual machines i.e. Windows, Ubuntu, Cisco Callmanagers etc on top of esxi
 
If you going to be using ESXi make sure its on the HCL to avoid problems and trying to load custom drivers
 
IMHO I wouldn't buy anything other than the Intel card, which is supported in ESXi btw.

Intel's driver support is excellent in all OSs (especially for their network chips). With other network chipsets (especially Broadcom and Realtek) the drivers are far from refined.

With other adapters the problems can be anything but it will usually be, will not work (eg. no driver), will work but needs a driver, or there is a driver. The Broadcom and Realtek adapters usually do have drivers but the drivers crash or they are unstable which will result in (at best) bad throughput, at worst a kernel panic. Most of the times the driver will just crash and your connection will die at which point it depends on the OS how to proceed. Solaris will automagically start it up again and you can connect again (but your previous copy/downloads/etc. will have been cut off) or in Linux you need to start it back up again with a script or commands.

That is my opinion based on quite a bit of experience in Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris (in my spare time and at work).

EDIT: Check my post above again, you can get an Intel quad port from eBay for about R2k which isn't that bad.
 
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Why won't 1 network port be enough? Do you need more than 1Gbps throughput?

At my office we're running quite a few servers on ESXi/Hyper-V, and none of them have more than 2 network ports.

For example: I'm using a single Ethernet Port for 3 virtual interfaces on my HP Microserver: 1 for Ubuntu x64 server, 1 for my router's WAN and 1 for my router's LAN. The router is MikroTik RouterOS x86 within VirtualBox.
 
Pada said:
Why won't 1 network port be enough? Do you need more than 1Gbps throughput?

At my office we're running quite a few servers on ESXi/Hyper-V, and none of them have more than 2 network ports.

For example: I'm using a single Ethernet Port for 3 virtual interfaces on my HP Microserver: 1 for Ubuntu x64 server, 1 for my router's WAN and 1 for my router's LAN. The router is MikroTik RouterOS x86 within VirtualBox.
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Doing Cisco labs is so much easier when you have physical interfaces to work with.
 
Centronix said:
12 in total. I need 12 ports for virtual routers that will connect to 4 physical Cisco switches. That's for the CCIE lab.
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VMWare sounds like a bit of overkill. Can just squeeze 12 x 7200 routers on my 4GB Win7 laptop with GNS3 (10 comfortably) once rtr ram & idlepc tuned.

Also why the need for 12 physical infs on the PC? Just run the 12 virtual rtr infs into virtual switch, then trunk out to physical switch, where you distrubute to individual access infs.
 
@Roman4604 : You can't prepare for the CCIE lab using GNS... Well, you can, but you really should be using physical kit, especially considering you cannot emulate layer 2 devices.

I don't get why you need so many network interfaces on a home server for the sake of running a Cisco lab. Just use an access server or PC > Access-layer switch > Distribution-layer switch... Or directly on distribution layer switch if you're feeling sloppy ;-)
 
srothman said:
@Roman4604 : You can't prepare for the CCIE lab using GNS... Well, you can, but you really should be using physical kit, especially considering you cannot emulate layer 2 devices.
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Yes I know, was recommending GNS3 for the routers (as a simpler alternative to VMWare). The virtual switch is merely to aggregate the router infs to trunk them to the physical world (to interconnect with real switches).

Thats said you can still do much of the basics with a 3745+ESW16 module, but you'll need at least 3550s to cover the whole CCIE R&S blueprint.
 
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