I've been seeing a lot of buzz around upgrading to 10 gigabit networking in home labs, but I'm curious about the real-world experiences out there. Sure, the bandwidth numbers look impressive on paper, but how many of us actually need it? I'm currently running a mix of Ubiquiti and MikroTik gear with mostly 1GbE connections, and everything feels snappy for my workloads: VMs, NAS backups, media streaming, the usual suspects.
The jump to 10GbE means new switches, NICs, and potentially DAC cables or fiber. For 2.5GbE, the investment is much lower, and it's becoming more affordable. But here's what I'm wrestling with: What's the sweet spot for a home lab in 2024? Are you pushing 10GbE because you genuinely need the throughput, or is it more about future-proofing? And what about the cooling, power consumption, and rack space implications?
I'd love to hear about your setup decisions. Consider sharing:
- Your current network topology and what drove your speed choices
- Whether you regret going higher (or wishing you had)
- Your infrastructure constraints—power, cooling, budget
- Real-world bottlenecks you've encountered with 1GbE
Also, if you're running pfSense or OPNsense as your router/firewall, how does your throughput scale with your chosen link speeds? I've heard some interesting takes on whether the CPU can even keep up. What's your experience been?
Dutch,
Great to have you in the forums. Definitely sounds like you have gone in the right direction and love your choice here of Unifi and Mikrotik. I honestly feel these two brands are two of the most cost-effective and feature rich options you can get for home lab purposes among others. 10 GbE for me is a necessity when it comes to clustering hypervisor nodes. I tried 2.5 GbE and while it was acceptable, I definitely saw some performance related issues. For things like live migration and cluster traffic, 10 gig is also very nice. But if you are planning on playing around with HCI, I think it is an absolute must.
But I will say, don't underestimate the impact of enterprise drives for HCI as well. 1 Gbe and 2.5 GbE are fine when you are carrying single stream traffic for various purposes. However, when you start multi-threading and carrying lots of "elephant flow" traffic types at the same time, this is where starting at 10 gig speeds, the network will start to shine.
Brandon