I posted previously about deploying software packages a different way; more reliable, faster, always the latest package… etc. and that’s all important but it’s also about pure speed.

The faster I can deploy a workstation; the better, and this is another area that needed improvement, our imaging system was running in Hyper-V as a Linux VM, the connection to the network was capped at 1Gbps (Gigabit per second). For lay people that means the imaging is ok but far from being great.

The way to improve that was to get a better bench switch, and a better workstation with a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet Ports to run Hyper-V… the switch I selected was the CRS310-8G-2S+IN from Mikrotik (MT), it has 8x 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports and 2x 10Gbps SFP ports, it also has enhanced hardware offloading for VLANs (hot 3+1 sure 🥵, talk nerdy to me…😏).

The workstations we have support 2.5Gbps – and most of the time we don’t even need a fraction of that speed… previously we were sending out our Windows 11 pro image at around 9.19 GB per min, on the new switch and upgraded imaging workstation – we are getting approx 16.40 GB per min or around a 78% increase in speed.

MT switches are great, but there is a lot of models and you really need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each design before purchasing… the block diagram helps understand how the switch is designed – Wilmar Almazan also has a great YouTube video on how to configure VLANs and the network bridge on the CRS3xx series… it is vital to understand this; configuring a MT switch in the proper way will take advantage of the onboard Marvell 98DX226S switch chip, incorrect configuration will force the CPU to do the work and that is a terrible idea if you already have hardware offloading capabilities.

At the end of the day, even with all the planning, God has ultimate control over everything so it’s by his mighty power that any of these things work in the slightest.

I hope there has been some useful information in this post!

Jason