I am building my personal private cloud. I am considering using second hand dell optiplexes as worker nodes, but they only have 1 NIC and I’d need a contraption like this for my redundant network.
Then this wish came to my mind. Theoretically, such a one box solution could be faster than gigabit too.
Nice idea if you actually have the rest of the redundant network, uplink and all that jazz (otherwise you’re wasting time and money).
the reason this won’t ever be a product is because if you’re serious about your redundancy you’re installing extra NICs inside the servers, which are ideally not second-hand. the only people who would be the target market of such a product is just you.
also: do these servers not have pcie slots inside? is there truly no way of adding nics inside?
Yes, the entire network is supposed to be redundant and load-balanced, except for some clients that can only connect to one switch (but if a switch fails it should be trivial to just move them to another switch.)
I am choosing dell optiplex boxes because it is the smallest x86 nodes I can get my hands on. There is no pcie slot in it other than m.2 SSD slot which will be used for SSD.