Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Is it possible to treat two directly connected 100gbe ports as 4x25gbe links?

Like the subject says. Let’s say I have two servers and each of them has a 100gbe NIC. Can I directly connect them using some sort of cable and have the OS/hypervisor/etc see it as four discrete 25gbe links?

Why? I thinking of deploying a 3 node Starwind VSAN cluster (see https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-3-node-hyperconverged-scenario-with-windows-server-2016/). They recommend you directly connect all the nodes to each other for the iSCSI and sync traffic, without using switches. That requires each host have 4 ports just for Starwind, on top of whatever else I’d need for general VM traffic and management. On a Dell 1U server with 2 PCIe slots and the mezzanine slot, it frees up a PCIe slot for a BOSS card or something else.



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