My home lab has undergone several changes over the last couple of years. The biggest one is that I upgraded to 10Gb networking. Initially, I used a SAN to hold all VM images and have each server access them over the network. I quickly realised that 1Gb networking wouldn’t work at an acceptable speed, so I upgraded my network and servers to 10Gb.
The first step was to buy a 10Gb switch. I wanted a quiet switch because it would be housed in my rack in my office, and I sit about 3-feet away from it. Initially, I was going to buy used network equipment from eBay, but most are too loud and will have been running for years with little to no maintenance. So I looked around and found the US-16-XG from Unifi at £400. This was expensive, but it has 12 SFP/SFP+ sockets and 4 x 10Gb Ethernet sockets, too – which meant I could use standard cat-6/7 ethernet cables for some of the connections.
My servers connect to the switch using 2 or 3-metre DAC cables. My TrueNAS connects using two DAC cables as they are bonded to provide additional bandwidth.
The best thing about using this switch is that, as with all other Unifi equipment, it is managed through the same controller software. So, I can view, monitor, upgrade and configure the switch and, if needed, each individual port, from the same single pane of glass.
