Fiber Optic NIC

Overdash

Hello,

I am looking for opinions on buying a good 1 - 10Gbps fiber card for my hyper-V server.

I will be hosting a Domain Controller, Exchange server, Web Server, and File server on 2.66Ghz Core i7, 16GB's DDR3, 2TB RAID 5 along with a few other VM's.

Right now I have two 1GB RJ-45 cards but I wanted to make a Hyper-V server with high availability/redundancy.

Side question: Do you think its a good idea to join a hyper-v server to the virtual domain that it hosts?

Thanks all,

themagicone

1gb Copper and 1gb fiber are the same thing. A 10gb fiber switch is going to cost a lot of money. A 1gb fiber switch is less but still expensive. Get a good 100/1000 managed switch and then you can set up ether-channel (or something like that) to combine multiple links to the server. Just my opinion.

it_consultant

Agreed, the only difference between gig copper and gig fiber is the distance it can be pulled. Look at your NIC utilization, if you are actually hitting 50 percent then you can think about 10GB, or you can team using HP or Dell utilities, which is much less expensive but still effective.

Overdash

Well I won't know the utilization until I set it up but the traffic will come from about 20 onsite pc's and 2 - 5 pc's over a site-to-site VPN.

Maybe I should just stick another card in my server and channel the ports on the switch, that's a good idea, I hadn't thought of that.

I agree that 1gbps is 1gbps regardless of interface, I just want to use the fiber port on my switch because it's there.