Silhouette of a person with rolling luggage walking through a futuristic, glowing tunnel lined with computer monitors and tech elements, with an airplane silhouette overhead and warm orange light radiating from the vanishing point.

The Journey not the Destination

SAN Switch

Close-up of a small network router or switch with multiple Ethernet cables plugged in, showing green activity LEDs lit up on active ports.

The Storage Area Network switch, in this case, is a Zyxel GS1200-8 it currently sells on Amazon for $35.00.   With the class of hardware we are using, there is no reason to look at the expense of 10G gear.  The GS1200-8 has two things useful as a SAN switch.  The first one, which is the more important of the two, is the fact that it supports jumbo frames (up to 9K).  The second one is that it supports VLANs, so I can keep the management on a separate network than the san traffic.

My VLAN config for the switch is as follows:

Managed switch web interface showing PVID configuration with ports assigned to VLANs 1 and 199, and an IEEE 802.1Q VLAN membership table displaying tagged and untagged egress member settings across six ports and a LAG group.
San Switch Configuration

Port 6 the default VLAN and where the management IP address is attached. VLAN 199 is the VLAN for the storage area network and is not routed off this switch.