Four 10G Ethernet ports in DL360 G7

[Mike Carlson_3]

The QuickSpecs for the DL360 G7 state "No more than two 10GbE I/O devices are supported in a single ProLiant server."
Is this a limitation on ports or adapters? Can I install two NC550SPF adapters for a total of four ports?

[Ali · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike,


10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters
NOTE: No more than two 10GbE I/O devices are supported in a single ProLiant server.
NOTE: A minimum of two Gigabytes (2 GB) of server memory is required per each adapter.

this limitation is for no of adapters not for no of ports.

You can install two NC550SPF adapters.

thanks,
Aftab

[rick jones]

Minor nit - HP does not certify that the 10GbE adaptors it sells can protect one from UVA/UVB rays, so it is "SFP" not "SPF" in NC550 et al :)

[Michael A. McKenney]

Probably because the PCIe bus would get maxed out by that much bandwidth. 20 Gbps team is 2.5 GBps of data transfer. I doubt the PCIe bus would handle more than that.

I can't see why you would need more than a 2.5 GB/s of data transfer. Even with the largest databases, that is a tremendous amount to data to move. You are talking millions of rows per second.

[rick jones]

99 times out of 10, each PCIe slot is its own "bus" and a PCIe Gen2 x8 slot has sufficient bandwidth (theoretical at least) to drive a dual-port 10GbE NIC to a quite reasonable level of throughput across both ports at the same time. Now, whether a given IOH has enough upstream bandwidth to drive at rate all the PCIe lanes it exports is a good question, but that isn't a PCIe "bus" at that point :)

[Mike Carlson_3]

Thanks. I need the ports for redundancy, I don't think any of the links will be close to saturated.