[Click] [OT] - Any suggestions on what hardware to buy?

[Alastair McKinley]

Hi Nicholas and Roman,

Thanks for your comments.


On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 09:26 -0700, Nicholas Weaver wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 12:21:42PM -0400, Roman Chertov composed:
> > 
> > Alastair McKinley wrote:
> > > Hi everyone,
> > > 
> > > Apologies for the slightly off topic question.
> > > 
> > > I want to run Click on a powerful machine with lots of interfaces
> > > (10-50, the more the better), and I was hoping that someone here might
> > > have an idea what to look for.
> > > 
> > > I guess I want e1000 NICS to support polling.  Can I buy such a beast
> > > off the shelf or should I build my own?  If I were to build it, what
> > > would I get to support enough e1000 NICS? 
> > 
> > I know that you can buy multi-port Intel Pros (e1000).  So you can get 
> > by with fewer cards.  I think 4 is the maximum.  That would require you 
> > to have 10 PCI slots to get 40 ports.  I am not sure who builds such 
> > motherboards.  Also you want the motherboard to have PCI-E bus to allow 
> > for maximum throughput.  Ideally you would use a at least two processors
> > for this thing.  Although I think this all depends on what traffic you 
> > expect to deal with.  If you expect the traffic to be small then you can 
> > get buy with a lesser machine.
> 
> One comment:  How much bandwidth do you expect to be pulling?
> 
> It might be substantially cheaper & easier to have a 48 port managed
> ethernet switch, and use fixed VLAN configurations to concentrate it
> down to 8 Gigabit cards in the host.  Since there is no whay you'd be
> able to support high bandwidth for 10+ ports in software, you might as
> well have the switch handle the port multiplexing etc.
> 
> 

The bandwidth I'm expecting is quite low.  Average about 8Mbits/port.

I'm trying to analyse and process the traffic from a number of different
hosts using Click.  Unfortunately each host needs to be connected to a
unique interface.

I haven't eliminated the idea of abandoning this approach altogether,
but I would like to give it a try.

So I guess I could get 4-5 4-port e1000 PCI-E NICS and stick them on a
motherboard with 4-5 PCI-E slots?

Once again, thanks everyone for your comments.


Alastair