Thursday, January 28, 2021

SFP Link Negotiation

In principle kind of a broad question, but I’ll provide the specific scenario:

I’m designing a topology for a DMZ in our org, and my constraints are that I have to repurpose hardware from a decommissioned site to do so. It’s not too bad, it could be far worse, but my current bottleneck is the router.

The router in question is a Cisco ISR 4430. It notably lacks any 10 gigabit ports, copper or otherwise. On the other end of things I have a handful of Netgear switches that will be separated into two stacks that will converge on the router via seperate interfaces. One is a M4300-12x12F and the other a M4300-28G-POE+. Due to the limitations, I can’t spare any RJ45 connections to uplink these switches to the router, only SFP+ 10 gigabit ports. The only SFP/SFP+ modules I have are Fiber, no copper.

Preferably I want to make it as easy as possible to insert a replacement router down the track that is capable of 10 gigabit, so question is - if I use 10G Fiber SFP+ modules on the switches, and connect to 1G Fiber SFP modules on the router, will link speed auto negotiation occur the same as with RJ45 Ethernet? Or will I need to use a 1G Fiber SFP module in the switches to compensate and replace them with 10G when a better router goes in?



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