Thursday, January 25, 2018

10 Gig Core switch in home lab

This might not be a normal request but I'm running out of 10G interfaces at my home "lab"

My current core switch (Juniper EX3300) that does most L3 termination (have one EX2300 as well) only has 4x10GE uplink ports. Currently two ESXi hosts has allocated half of those, one NAS has the 3:th and the fourth goes to the EX2300.

I'd like to introduce another EX2300 for my backup NAS (to move away from L2 and LACP agg)

However I'm not sure what would be the best topology and to what cost. Another EX3300 would make the most sense, running Core+Access and do L3 in Access and let the core forward traffic to my vSRX firewall if needed (traffic between routing-instances and security zones). All routing is done with OSPF in core + a few BGP sessions in the vSRX to the outside world.

I'm also thinking about to let the EX3300 be the core switch and use three EX2300 as access switches, however they do not support routing-instances (what a bummer) and I'd like to do L3 in the access layer. Also they only have 2x10GE uplinks, not really meant for access ports meaning my ESXi hosts would not be able to connect to the same switch.

There are a lot of 10GE switches out there (With SFP+) but as this is home I'd like them to be quiet and not consume a load of power :)

Another option is to do L2 aggregation with cheaper switches, but most of them only offers copper ports (not really an option here)

What would you do?



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