Upgrade from 10GBPS to 1GBPS switch equipment
Upgrade from 10GBPS to 1GBPS switch equipment
You're checking if the diskless network setup will improve your clients' data transfer speeds. This approach can indeed enhance performance by eliminating local storage delays, especially with faster connections like a 10Gbps switch. The real-time speed you experience may be noticeably better compared to traditional setups with slower NICs and hard drives.
You're likely limiting the 48 port switches to 1Gbps unless they have additional 10Gbps uplinks that aren't shown. It would be better to use an 8-port or similar 10Gb switch instead of two separate switches with two 10Gb ports each.
This configuration seems unnecessary because you're linking single 1Gbps switches to two 10Gbps ones. It appears redundant—you could simply remove the extra switches and still achieve the desired outcome.
You'll need 48 port gigabit switches with 10G uplinks. I suggest Ubiquiti models, as they offer dual SFP+ 10G ports that let you connect them in series and use a spare port for your 10G device. You won't really need 20G links since redundancy is better; if you don’t plan to run a caching server on that 10G port, you won’t gain much benefit from it. Most traffic will still go through the wider WAN connection anyway.
That would actually be counterintuitive. The client needs full access to data via the network, not local caching. Others mentioned @Vexillio should use 10G connections. Adding more switches doesn't add value here.
You may need to explore this when using managed switches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation It could address your performance challenges and improve system stability. In networking, remember the rule: one link equals two links, and you should think about server bottlenecks—otherwise, better switches won’t help much. Consider setting up a failover cluster with a load balancer in front, ensuring dual 10 gig connections between cluster nodes and the load balancer. Also, maintain strong connections to your core switches.
I've set up several diskless environments where 1Gbit suffices in most cases, mainly for security and simplifying image handling. When the 48 port switches support a 10G uplink, it reduces bottlenecks for each client while still limiting individual clients to 1Gbit; together they offer up to 10G bandwidth. If your switches lack 10G uplinks, using them won't provide any advantage. On systems employing disk caching (SSDs on devices), disk performance and network load can be greatly improved. Key points to keep in mind: with 10G uplinks, fast storage is essential—aim for SSDs capable of 1180MB/s theoretically—and consider RAM caching. Avoid low-cost SSDs; opt for reliable ones with strong endurance. Boot issues become a concern, and running all devices at once strains network capacity. Monitoring PXE and DHCP services is vital; if they fail, clients can't boot. A 1Gbit connection delivers about 115MB/s per client for disk I/O (read only, not write), and a jumbo MTU of 9000 is necessary for storage operations. If you're using iSCSI, consider adding redundant connections per machine and employing multi-path IO (MPIO).