bridge 10G and 1GbE together

[mka]

I'm currently thinking about upgrading the link from my Photo&Video Workstation to my FreeNAS system to 10G Ethernet. To safe 800€ worth of Ethernet Switch I was thinking about leaving the 1GbE LAN setup untouched and bridge the interfaces on my Workstation and FreeNAS maschine with 10G cards and connect them point-to-point. Like this:

Code:

.--workstation--------.                                  .---FreeNAS-----------.
|                     |                                  |                     |
|  Bridge           [eth0] ---------10G Ethernet ------[eth0]       Bridge     |
|  br0              [eth1] --\                   /-----[eth1]       br0        |
|  192.168.1.200      |       \                 /        |       192.168.1.100 |
.---------------------.        \[ 1GbE Switch ]/         .---------------------.
                                       |
                               { rest of the LAN }

The IP address of the previous cards should be assigned to the bridged interfaces. So the machines can be reached with the same ip address no matter if using the 1GbE from the LAN or the 10G connection from my workstation. I havn't found infos to configure or setup a network bridge using the freenas gui -- just Link Aggregation. This can of course be done using the console but how will FreeNAS react to a bridge interface? Can this setup work with the current FreeNAS? Or are there any plans to setup bridged interfaces for FreeNAS?

Thank you!

 

[Ericloewe]

I'm a bit confused.

Theoretically, all you'd need to do is have the 10Gb link on a different subnet and give each end static IPs.
The GbE network would be setup just the same.

Bridging interfaces would only be useful if only one end was connected the the GbE network - and even then, it wouldn't be a good setup.

 

[cyberjock]

I used to do something kind of like what you are doing... but.... you can't do this....

The IP address of the previous cards should be assigned to the bridged interfaces. So the machines can be reached with the same ip address no matter if using the 1GbE from the LAN or the 10G connection from my workstation.

That you can't do with FreenAS.

The only way I know of to do what you want is to leave the current IPs where they are and add the 10Gb as their own static IPs on a separate subnet.

 

[mka]

Too bad, but thank you!

Theoretically, all you'd need to do is have the 10Gb link on a different subnet and give each end static IPs.
The GbE network would be setup just the same.

Of course... but I want to access the NAS or workstation by the same IP no matter if I use the 1GbE or 10G link. The bridge will figure out which path to take.

Bridging interfaces would only be useful if only one end was connected the the GbE network - and even then, it wouldn't be a good setup.

Why?

 

[Ericloewe]

You need a router for that kind of setup, which means you can't do it in FreeNAS.

Traffic would probably have to go through the router, to make things worse.

If you can acquire a router capable of multi-gigabit routing, you could connect the server to the router via GbE, instead of connecting it to a Gigabit switch. GbE clients would then access the server via its 10Gb IP address, with the proper rules set up.
This setup creates quite a bottleneck, so I would not recommend it at all. A small 10Gb switch might end up being cheaper (accounting for time wasted) than this crazy setup.