I have managed to get my hands on two Draytek P2280x switches and would like to connect them together. They have 24 1G ports and 4 10G SFP+ ports.
Switch 1 will also need to connect to a PC running Pfsense, Switch 2 & a Netgear GS724T switch (RJ45 due to distance).
Switch 2 will also need to connect to a NAS (with 1G connection).
Was planning to connect the switches using DAC & probably via a LAG (2 SFP+ ports). Also a SFP+ connection to Pfsense from Switch 1 & a SFP+ connection to the NAS.
Does this seem reasonable? Will I need a LAG between the switches in reality, apart from a redundancy point of view?
Is there a better way of connecting all of this up?
I’m aware it doesn’t increase the speed but it does increase bandwidth to prevent bottlenecks etc doesn’t it? I’ll LAGG them, I assume having 2 in the LAGG would be sufficient.
If it were me, I wouldn’t daisy chain the switches. Since these are managed switches, I would try to connect them both to the LAN side of pfSense, and segregate specific VLANs to each switch. These switches will do routing within the same VLAN right on the switch without making a hop to pfSense unless you are going in between VLANs. So lets say you had 5 VLANs, and 1 or 2 of those were more important/high priority. I would try to put the most important VLANs and all the devices on those VLANs on one switch, and then do the same thing for your remaining VLANs on the other switch. Maybe my logic is flawed but that is how I think about it. Seems like it would be faster that way.
Yes, that is an option and I did think about it. I purchased these 2 switches to get 10G and also to do inter-VLAN routing on the switch rather than going via Pfsense as the transfer rates on Iperf3 are showing as 50 Mbits/sec to a NAS on a separate VLAN but are 943 Mbits/sec on the same VLAN. Still don’t get why the transfer via Pfsense is so low at 50Mbits/sec to be honest.