Network design for a home renovation.

Hi,

After a bit of discussion here, I have now decided to install cat6 as I renovate the new two storey apartment I am in the process of buying.

The network(s) I plan to put in will be used for media (HD, SD and music) and for the internet.

I am trying to network most rooms with two points (one for iptv they have here and the other for media players streaming from a NAS box).

As you can see from the diagram below I am trying to maximise the throughput from the NAS by having a separate network card for each subnets dedicated to AV and by having a share based around a individual HDD dedicated to each NIC. The theory is that if two people are streaming HD content on subnet A then they will not affect anyone on subnet B from doing the same.

Internet access is limited to my backup NAS box which will also perform download duties if required, our two PC's and my home and work laptops.

I have not connected the other devices to the internet feed as I do not want the switch supplying the feed to bridge between subnet A and B thus negating the point of the NAS having separate NICS for each subnet.

I would love to hear any ideas for improving on the design if anyone has any.



Thanks
RB

Ok, first revision. No reason why subnet A cannot have internet access as long as it does not bridge to subnet B



RB

I'd probably get a patch panel, that way you could start off with the 8 port gbit switch without having to upgrade until you've used 8 ports?

/edit: Missed that you already have probably 8 devices, I'd not be getting 2 * 8 ports plus a 4port switch, why not get one 16/24 port?

I agree with Morfmedia. I'd get a 16 or 24 port switch and use VLAN's if what you are aiming for is segregation of traffic (or traffic prioritisation). If you want bandwidth aggregation some switches (HP Procurve for example) can use trunking/port aggregation to double the throughput to your nics in your NAS. (e.g instead of 2 x 1Gbit/s it's treated logically as 1 x 2Gbit/s) Internal speed of the switch will be greater than wire speed between the 8 port switches for sure.

Only downside is that you then have a single point of failure if the switch goes down.

Thanks to both of you.

I initially thought of a 24 port switch but without the separate subnets the traffic from the server would most likely only use the single NIC. Single point of failure is not really an issue as it is just for movies etc at home.

Setting up two vlans is something I will take a look in to. Good idea.

I also looked at link aggregation and would love to do it but the 24port switches tend to be quite pricey. I can get a couple of TP-Link Gbit 8 port switches for around S$200. Can I get a Gbit 24 port HP Procurve for under S$400 ? I see there is some recon stuff on t'bay but am not sure which have link aggregating.

The switches will all be fed via a patch panel (well two, one for each subnet).

The other idea about the having the two independent disks is to not let multiple requests all trying to access different parts of the disks to slow the disk down two much as it jumps back and forth. The two disks would also be a backup of each other should one fail.

RB

Ok, seems like the HP Procurve 1810G-24 has 22 Gbit ports, 2 Gbit/GBIC uplink ports, supports VLAN and is web managed and can be had for 240quid or so.

Looks like it may fit the bill. Any other models worth looking at ?

Thanks
RB

RimBlock said:

Thanks to both of you.

I initially thought of a 24 port switch but without the separate subnets the traffic from the server would most likely only use the single NIC. Single point of failure is not really an issue as it is just for movies etc at home.

Setting up two vlans is something I will take a look in to. Good idea.

I also looked at link aggregation and would love to do it but the 24port switches tend to be quite pricey. I can get a couple of TP-Link Gbit 8 port switches for around S$200. Can I get a Gbit 24 port HP Procurve for under S$400 ? I see there is some recon stuff on t'bay but am not sure which have link aggregating.

The switches will all be fed via a patch panel (well two, one for each subnet).

The other idea about the having the two independent disks is to not let multiple requests all trying to access different parts of the disks to slow the disk down two much as it jumps back and forth. The two disks would also be a backup of each other should one fail.

RB

Click to expand...

To be honest, looking at your requirements i'm of the opinion that port trunking/aggregation is overkill. Providing the switches you intend to buy allow you to configure VLAN's then you should be fine. You should then be able to segregate each subnet and limit the connections on the right hand side of your diagram to connecting only to the NAS NIC and other members of that VLAN (as per your diagram)

If you want the RHS of the diagram to access the internet too then you will need the ability to route between VLAN's. Whilst not 100% sure I'd presume that your Linux box and distro of choice should be able to facilitate this routing requirement if required.

ck

New version (with LACP) as it was done before I saw your reply.

A bit more detail on the components as well.

The NAS shares will be linked to the VLans via a login / password setup.

Still trying to get my head fully around the VLan.

If the NAS NICs are aggregated, how would the data get to whichever VLan is not on the servers subnet/same VLan as the server ?. Would the switch act as a router between VLans and any connections not on a VLan ?.

New diagram



Many thanks
RB

Personally I'd skip having 2 subnets and all the load balancing, run the server as RAID1 and job done. It'll cope ok with whatever you're throwing at it I think.

morfmedia said:

Personally I'd skip having 2 subnets and all the load balancing, run the server as RAID1 and job done. It'll cope ok with whatever you're throwing at it I think.

Click to expand...

This.

Looks like you're making this massively more complicated than it needs to be, what sort of "HD" material are you talking about as you'd need to be running about 10 unicast streams to saturate a GigE link and that assumes uncompressed BluRay type content - something I doubt you have.

The 1810-24 is a decent switch, if you're *that* worried that you might run out of bandwidth going into one NIC on your NAS then run LACP as previously suggested and slap a decent Intel nic into the machine, but beyond that I really don't see the point of multiple VLANS.

Thanks for the advice.

I am working towards allowing the following to run;
3*8GB MKV HD streams from say, living room, bedroom and study (NAS shared not transcoded and streamed).
200MBit Internet connection
Copying a large 8GB MKV Bluray rip from PC1 -> NAS

The problem with Raid 1 is that all requests for data will be hitting one disk. If the disk can provide 744Mbps (average) for a single stream then what will this drop to trying to manage 4 streams (3 HD reads and 1 HD write). Will it drop to a level where it cannot share the HD streams quickly enough for playback by the media players. Is there any room for larger bandwidth ? Two drives acting independently should half the load (all things being equal), allow a faster copy to the NAS.

I really have no idea of the answer to the above questions and would be very interested to hear from others more knowledgeable.

I am not bothered about internet connectivity to the second VLan as all it will be used for is updating firmware on the media players at this point.

Another option would be looking at going for Raid 5 so the media disks would be striped allowing faster throughput to better try to match the capacity of two NICS. The third drive would be used for parity.

For an understanding of volume, I have around 2TB of data at the moment.

Drive failure will be a pain but protecting against it is not a major concern as I can always re-rip my DVD's and Blurays if needed.

Thanks
RB

A couple of points:

I may have missed this but is there a DHCP server (the Procurve?) or are you using static IP addresses?

I wouldn't advise RAID5 using only three HDDs - the performance degradation when one fails is enormous. I'd go for four or, preferably, five drives.

Based on what you've said above I'd maybe look at trunking a nice with LCAP and keeping the video on a separate set of drives to be sure of no problems but "8Gb MKV" is not really that high bitrate (native BluRay is what, 55Gb?).

If it were me I'd personally say leave the media players with internet access, upgrading firmware aside it may be handy for features such as internet radio, or youtube streaming if that sort of thing takes your fancy?

@Snapshot - the ProCurve doesn't have a DHCP server in it, fairly sure you don't start to get those sort of features until you're a fair bit higher up the range, or at least into the switches with lightweight L3 feature sets.

Wow, quite a lot to discuss.

RimBlock said:

...Still trying to get my head fully around the VLan.

If the NAS NICs are aggregated, how would the data get to whichever VLan is not on the servers subnet/same VLan as the server ?. Would the switch act as a router between VLans and any connections not on a VLan ?...

Click to expand...

You would be using port-based VLANs, whereby each port can be a member of more than one VLAN at a time. You would assign the NAS ports 23/24 to be members of both VLAN A and VLAN B. This would allow communication between e.g. 1->23 and 12->23, but not 1->12. The NAS will need one IP in each subnet. Note that since you are using different IP subnets you don't actually need to separate them physically or via VLAN. Normal data traffic from the 192.168.1.x subnet will not interfere with traffic from the 192.168.2.x subnet irrespective whether they traverse the same segment, unmanaged switch or are bridged together. Just to be clear: 192.168.1.1/24 cannot communicate directly with 192.168.2.1/24, even if they are plugged directly via crossover cable; there must be a router in between set as the gateway.

If you did want internet access for the 2.x subnet then you could simply set a second IP to the ISP router if supported (presumably not that ADSL model once you get the 200Mb fiber). Otherwise add a cheap ethernet router e.g. Netgear WGR614.

Having said the above, I don't see the point of different subnets anyway. Traffic will already be getting separated in the NAS by addressing the different shares i.e. the 1.x subnet devices will only be accessing Share 2 (and NIC 2 if you abandon bonding). As others have said, you could simplify a lot.

RimBlock said:

I am working towards allowing the following to run;
3*8GB MKV HD streams from say, living room, bedroom and study (NAS shared not transcoded and streamed).
200MBit Internet connection
Copying a large 8GB MKV Bluray rip from PC1 -> NAS

The problem with Raid 1 is that all requests for data will be hitting one disk. If the disk can provide 744Mbps (average) for a single stream then what will this drop to trying to manage 4 streams (3 HD reads and 1 HD write). Will it drop to a level where it cannot share the HD streams quickly enough for playback by the media players. Is there any room for larger bandwidth ? Two drives acting independently should half the load (all things being equal), allow a faster copy to the NAS.

I really have no idea of the answer to the above questions and would be very interested to hear from others more knowledgeable.

I am not bothered about internet connectivity to the second VLan as all it will be used for is updating firmware on the media players at this point.

Another option would be looking at going for Raid 5 so the media disks would be striped allowing faster throughput to better try to match the capacity of two NICS. The third drive would be used for parity.

For an understanding of volume, I have around 2TB of data at the moment.

Drive failure will be a pain but protecting against it is not a major concern as I can always re-rip my DVD's and Blurays if needed.

Click to expand...

In terms of disk performance the streaming will not tax a single HDD. I've seen benches showing approx 40MBps random access read speed for the older version of that drive (4x 500GB platters, now shipping as 3x 667GB which should be faster). I can't state for exactly your scenario, but suggest you look at PVRs. The relatively old 160Gb IDE HDD in a Virgin V+ box can manage to record 3 streams while playing 2. Granted this is heavily compressed broadcast HD (approx 10Mbps) and your MKVs will be around double that, but WD do quote the AV version of your drive as capable of playing upto 12 HD streams. I think the only thing that will stress a single HDD is computer file use e.g. copying large files or making backups.

My understanding is that some RAID1 implementations can read from both disks when there are multiple read requests. Alternatively R5 could work for you, but take care over write performance. Soft RAID (i.e. OS or desktop motherboard) implementations generally have a heavy penalty. Ideally go for a HW controller with dedicated XOR chip e.g. Dell PERC, HP SmartArray. Although, for the same cost you could invest in a 4th drive and just use RAID 1+0 with soft RAID. Whatever, make sure the controller and OS driver make good use of NCQ, as multi-user scenarios is where this shines.

The NAS RAM is overkill at 6GB if all it's doing is file sharing. You could probably drop to 2GB with no visible penalty.

My suggestion:
Use a single subnet, no VLANs. Keep the 24port smart switch. Keep NIC bonding. Use 2 HDDs in NAS, but not R1. Have all streaming devices use HDD1. All computer devices and video uploading goes to HDD2, which syncs automatically to HDD1 during off-peak hours.

Snapshot said:

A couple of points:

I may have missed this but is there a DHCP server (the Procurve?) or are you using static IP addresses?

I wouldn't advise RAID5 using only three HDDs - the performance degradation when one fails is enormous. I'd go for four or, preferably, five drives.

Click to expand...

Yep, you are quite right. I thought about the DHCP server and then promptly forgot about them .

At this time the ADSL box provides DHCP functions. If I kept the VLans then I would probably have another unit on the second lan act as a second DHCP server.

3 drives will max the 2Gbit aggregated NIC throughput based on specs with a bit of extra speed to spare. As it is not a business critical set-up, I think I can live with a bit a slowdown while I source a replacement drive or even cope with being without the NAS for a week or so. How easy is it to expand from 3 to 4 drives in raid5 ? Is it simply a case of adding another drive as a data drive and then rebuilding the raid set ?.

I am of course trying to keep this project to as low a budget as possible. It has gone from S$1K to almost S$2k although the switch accounts for around S$700 of that .

Thanks for the feedback it is very much appreciated.

RB

wij said:

Based on what you've said above I'd maybe look at trunking a nice with LCAP and keeping the video on a separate set of drives to be sure of no problems but "8Gb MKV" is not really that high bitrate (native BluRay is what, 55Gb?).

Click to expand...

Nope but multiple streams along with internet and moving files around etc. All adds up and would rather over engineer a bit than to finish the set-up and find out the media players are stuttering and sound is cutting out. I can imagine my wifes face if that was happening and then I showed her the S$2k bill .

wij said:

If it were me I'd personally say leave the media players with internet access, upgrading firmware aside it may be handy for features such as internet radio, or youtube streaming if that sort of thing takes your fancy?

Click to expand...

Yep, understood but they are not really of interest to me at the moment. That could have course change in the future.

Cheers
RB

How is the routing going to work, how will for instance the xbox get onto xbox live? Also, why are you limiting what can be accessed with differing networks. If security is a concern you should be setting permissions correctly. Not sure either why your bother to agregrate ethernet either without using jumbo packets which isn't an option on your network.

Ah nuts. I wrote a long reply to Vsmora at work and forgot to post it .

Ok, updated diagram now and I will post the reply from work tomorrow morning.



RB

Much better, but I'd still be looking to get rid of that d-link switch and ISP provided router for something better and perhaps an all in one. I'd also move the backup NAS onto the procurve.

Does seem a bit of a shame to spend all that money on a managed switch but if you're set on bonding then fair enough.

I'd also look to have a decent DHCP / DNS server internally for all that, but thats just me.

Yes, agreed - much better.
I think I'd run DHCP & DNS on the Linux server. Of course, it does depend how much access RB has to the ISP-supplied router. Being Singapore, I wouldn't be surprised if it was compulsory and locked down.