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.
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