It begins.

https://i.postimg.cc/v8zM1cfF/20220607-195321.jpg

Looks lonely. Needs a mate 🤣

The mate is the 25G port on a Mikrotik CCR2004.

As long as I'm careful I can coax the required throughput from it. Will be fitting behind the CCR2116 basically taking 2 x 10G ports and via the wonders of ECMP feeding the 2116.

2116 will live purely to handle per-connection classification and balancing. Won't even be the default gateway for the LAN to keep inter-LAN traffic away from it.

The 2004 having no filter rules to speak of or anything smart to do other than split packets evenly between two routed links means it can fastpath everything.

Will only need the 2116 as new hardware, along with a couple of optics and a DAC.

NIC #2 purchased. Dedicated fibre for 25G in place. 25G DAC ordered. Next 25GBase-BX optics and will be good to go besides the 2116, which will be purchased once the circuits are confirmed.

The 10G network is fine until the first circuit goes in when I'll bring the 25G star live to offload the two busiest machines from the 10G LAN.

Debating whether to borrow a fibre from the 10G to connect to the dedicated 25G or run the new cable the rest of the way. May well do the latter and at the same time install WiFi 6e. Keeps the resilient 10G ring in place and physically bypasses it via bridge interface on the 2004.

Will have a bridge interface covering the 2 25G ports on the router and the two 10G ports and use that bridge for VRRP. Right now it's a port channel but that will not be required and will take some load off the CPU.

Only really issue is that the 25G devices have to go through the 2004 to get to the rest of the LAN but that's unlikely to be an issue. The highest bandwidth end devices on the LAN with those offloaded are 2.5G. Would need to saturate the Internet connections and both 2.5G devices to hit the throughput limit on the 2004.

I could do it far cleaner but this'll work. Those of us that don't have unlimited budgets have to spend wisely.

Sounds good. Got a network drawing handy? I’m a simpleton and like pictures 😎

Yep, sent PM with a few of them.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

Those of us that don't have unlimited budgets have to spend wisely.

What will be total the monthly ongoing costs for this?

In reply to a post by Ripley:

What will be total the monthly ongoing costs for this?

Unpleasant.

But less than you might think. Most of the capacity is burst / shared so it won't come close to the costs of the equivalent dedicated access.

The Internet bill has historically been high anyway from use of multiple providers for redundancy, justified to at least some extent by how much of my work happens at home.

EDIT: The capacity is really, really shared. It's incredibly unlikely but combined throughput could, in theory, drop to sub-300 Mbit. That isn't going to happen, a number of things that would make Internet access quite irrelevant like huge natural disasters or nuclear war are way more likely, but it's not impossible.

Edited by XGS_Is_On (Sat 11-Jun-22 13:21:48)

Okay! Awaiting completion of build for first 10, actually 8.5, Gbit.

Once that's done will purchase the 2116. Existing equipment can comfortably handle a single circuit.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Looks lonely. Needs a mate 🤣

Not only did it get a mate but as you might've noticed it's a half-height card. I've switched out the brackets for full-height so that I can plug into a PC and tower server. The tower is served by a 25G DAC, the PC by a 25GBase-BX run.

So either way I've 25G in the property. Definitely no need to upgrade anything major for a while now.