Intel LAN: i210 vs i350

[koifish59]

I just received a motherboard with dual intel i210 LAN ports. On other servers, I install a intel i350 quad port NIC and they work awesome.

Would I get any benefits using an add-on higher end NIC compared to using the onboard i210? I'll only be needing link aggregation, that's about it. Will upgrading to the i350 give a more consistent or higher transfer speeds?

 

[Ericloewe]

Unlikely. i210-AT is the high-end single-port GbE solution. I don't see it lacking anything the i350 might have that would be relevant for a one-port controller.

 

[tvsjr]

The big difference between the two is the VT-C (virtualization technology for connectivity) functionality. Not valuable for anything non-virtual.

 

[Something]

The i210 doesn't support full bandwidth for aggregation I believe. The i350 will.

http://ark.intel.com/products/64400/Intel-Ethernet-Controller-I210-AT

That's the best I could tell from digging in.

 

[koifish59]

Based on this specs sheet, I don't see anywhere that the dual onboard i210 supports teaming/link aggregation (802.3ad), unless someone can point it out? I may be forced to use the i350 add-on card.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...rs/i210-ethernet-controller-family-brief.html

 

[Ericloewe]

Based on this specs sheet, I don't see anywhere that the dual onboard i210 supports teaming/link aggregation (802.3ad), unless someone can point it out? I may be forced to use the i350 add-on card.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...rs/i210-ethernet-controller-family-brief.html

Sure it does. Even the crummy realteks do.

 

[Gunndy]

Sure it does. Even the crummy realteks do.

I cannot find any documentation regarding the i210 platform from Intel supporting 802.3ad (Link Aggregation/Teaming). Does anyone have this sort of board running with LAGG? Only MBs I've found that say they support Dual GB LAN or 802.3ad that have an i210 have another model of NIC for their 2nd option.

 

[Stux]

i350 vs i210

As I understand, the i350 works very well with VMs. Essentially, with the i210, each VM will either need a NIC allocated to it to be efficient, or the hypervisor's VirtualSwitch will have to do the work.

With the i350, the NIC can act as many virtual NICs, so each VM can have one, and thus the work of the "Virtual Switch" is offloaded to the NIC.

It probably doesn't matter at gigabit speeds anymore.