In preparation for working with Boot from SAN and other high network requirement work with my Synology, I looked into getting a 10gbe adapter.  Unfortunately, the Synology Branded 10gbe Adapters are extremely expensive.

I was lucky enough to have a Mellanox ConnectX-2 Card kicking around.   These single port 10gbe cards can be found on eBay for less than 20$.

After 3D printing a low profile bracket for the card found on ThingiVerse, I was able to power up the Synology with card and connect over 10gbe without issue.

Although I have yet to test the adapter for a normal workload, Synology supports other Mellanox Cards on its other Devices.  We can also see by SSHing into the Synology, that the device correctly loaded the mlx4_en drivers.

[Mon Feb 26 11:22:58 2018] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth4: link is not ready
[Mon Feb 26 11:22:58 2018] mlx4_en: eth4: Link Up
[Mon Feb 26 11:22:58 2018] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth4: link becomes ready

In the coming weeks I hope to have a series of posts detailing Boot from SAN configurations for ESXi as well as new posts and benchmarks working with Intel’s Xeon Bronze Series of chips.