I am in the process of building a home server using windows home server 2011, standard micro atx motherboard, and "desktop" quality part's besides the raid card and five 3TB Seagate NAS HDDs. The motherboard has an on board Intel NIC that supports teaming, so I plan to buy either a single Intel PCI-e gigabit NIC, or four NIC "Server" version by Intel. I also plan to put the same PCI-e gigabit NIC('s) in two of my computer's including the very high end PC desktop I'm in the process of building as well. I currently have the house wired with cat. 6 cable connected to a patch panel and then a 16 port Netgear (unmanaged) Gigabit Switch.
Anyway's, I'm curious if I need to purchase a "smart"/managed switch that says it supports link aggregation (teaming) groups, or if that is only the case if I have NIC's that don't support teaming themselves? I may upgrade to a 24 port switch anyway, since I actually have a 24 port patch panel that is fully utilized, some ports just aren't currently connected to a switch.
I've put in a few home networks myself, but none with a managed switch yet, so I'm sure some people can fill in parts I might overlook, or correct me if I'm way off base with anything. . .but, that said - I would go with a managed switch (and will eventually upgrade my home to one), especially if you're running pretty high horsepower stuff through it (by the sounds of the NAS you're building and the desktop PC, etc.) just for the more granular control and monitoring the managed switch can give you.
Even if you don't need/use VLANs, just the 802.3ad (LACP) link aggregation seems like it would benefit you a lot if you're going ahead and putting appropriate NICs in anyway (and plan on doing the data transfer from multiple places simultaneously that will benefit from this). Also the more nuanced QOS, IGMP snooping, and the port mirroring ability is really interesting should you ever want to run Wireshark on a computer and actually be able to feed it all the packets going through your network - something impossible on a managed switch.
On the least expensive side of things Newegg has the
TP-LINK JetStream TL-SG3424 for $263, and Amazon has the
Cisco SG200-26 Gigabit Ethernet Smart Switch for $279, both very well reviewed 24 port switches. I'm sure there are others, and Dell & HP switches always pop up on eBay from off-lease resellers. But even at those prices above, that's not all that much more than I paid for my unmanaged gigabit D-link switch a year or so ago.
On your NAS box and the other NICs, I have heard reviews where people claim to have successfully implemented link aggregation/port trunking in some form using an on MB NIC & a PCI card, but I've also heard a lot of stories saying to use two identical NICs that support it or a multi ethernet port card, and not to mix and match. I don't have first hand experience, just have read a lot of comments and threads across the net with varying degrees of success. I would just double check that the NICs you plan on using support not just whatever the manufacturer describes as teaming, but the actual functions you want to do, such as 802.3ad Link Aggregation, or Load Balancing, etc., I've heard of situations where some things will implement, but some won't.
I've also read threads on this board that state Win8 doesn't support LACP, I have no first hand knowledge of that, but worth checking out of you're going to be having any Win8 desktops that you want to do link aggregation with.
And you mentioned you're building some of these machines yourself, don't know how far into the builds you are, but there are a handful of MBs out there with dual NIC support built into the board directly. Here are
47 Intel MBs and
1 AMD MB at Newegg alone that have dual NICs on board.
Also, have you thought about doing a firewall in a PC (or a VM instance on one of your multi-NIC high powered PCs?). You could, theoretically make a really high performance network if you took your incoming WAN -> Firewall device -> gigabit switch, with an AP or two connected to the switch, but not doing any routing themselves. Since you could have, in theory, multiple very fat pipes of data transfer going around your LAN, why not let the server do most of the work and put all the firewall, DHCP, DNS, front line network stuff on its own box. Like I said there are VMs that can do that, or, if you're already putting a rack together to hold your patch panel, and switch, etc, you can usually find
great deals on eBay on rack mounted (both full depth and shallow depth) servers from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc, many of which have dual NICs built in, and you could run something like
Untangle,
SophosUTM (&
random blog post about a home install),
pfSense, etc. Also, this is a
cool article post MS-WHS2011 options, and Paul Thurrott's
WinSuperSite.com is always full of great articles on this.
Hope this helps! Look forward to hearing more about your build out and planning as things roll forward. ..
