My router currently offers Dual WAN, however if the ethernet ports are only 1gbit, what purpose does this serve? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you
For dual Wan you can use this for failover, so when VM goes down you switch over to 5G for example or use both via load balancing perhaps, you may be able to Lag two 1Gb ports off your current VM hub to get the remainder of Gib1 to your network.
For example I had my eye on this:
▷ ASUS XG-C100C 10GBase-T PCIe Network Adapter | OcUK (overclockers.co.uk)
Which seems decently priced for what it is, unless there's any drawbacks I'm unaware of?
That'd do the job, 2.5G cards can be had for less than 30quid though and are on most new mobos if you wanted to keep costs measured.
There were some issues with the ac107 chipset and some NAS distros in the past so I went for Intel x550 as it is dual 10G and only uses 4 lanes, those past issues have probably been resolved now and was specific to Unraid I think but it might have have been freenas, my memory is not serving me well.
For 10Gb you need decent ethernet cabling and the cost of other supporting hardware hubs/switches etc ramps up, you still need to have some reason to use it, I use it for fast remote storage to a NAS. My gear is 10 and 2.5G desktop switches/hubs all fanless and rj45, not cheap as mentioned but are silent, if a little toasty.
Why do you feel you need more than 1 Gbps? If you don't know, you probably don't need it.
I get the impression he must have gig1 as he says get full if the VM had a 2.5G port you could actually get the full bandwidth of gig1 fibre which is something like 1150Mb.
Internet speeds beyond 1 Gbps aren't really designed to be saturated by one single consumer device. Sure, it's cool and all that however it's designed to be able to feed higher speeds to multiple clients. So if you have 2 Gbps internet, two devices can enjoy full 1 Gbps speeds as an example.
If you use third party infrastructure your internet with VM is fed from that 1Gb port which is not up to the job of supporting gig1, ideally you'd want to deliver full bandwidth from port to your internal network to handle how you would like.