Packet capture node networking issue
The packet capture node has 2 dual-port 100Gb Mellanox connectX-5 cards in it. Our plan was to connect each of those 4 ports to the Netscout at 40Gb (that is the most the Netscout supports) and then we could mirror traffic on the Netscout down those 4 ports and capture it.
The problem is that, the Netscout can only mirror a port to a like speed port, either 10Gb->10Gb or 40Gb->40Gb. It cannot mirror a 10Gb port to the 40Gb link to the capture node.
What we would really, really like to do is treat each of the 40Gb links as 4x10Gb so that we would effectively have 16 10Gb mirror links to the packet capture node. But doing this means we need to be able to "break out", on the NIC side, each of the 40Gb ports. But I have seen no indication that we can do that. SR-IOV allows us to create virtual NICs, but those get multiplexed by the NIC onto the single 40Gb outgoing physical device. But since a 40Gb link is really just 4 10Gb links bonded (in some way at some level), then maybe this would be possible. Needs more research. Complicating this is the fact that we actually have a 100Gb interface scaled down to 40Gb and then broken up.
Ideally, we would like to keep our 4 QSFP+ to QSFP+ cables between the Netscout and capture node and just run both sides "broken out". But we could also run breakout cables using the 4 NIC ports to go to 16 physical ports on the Netscout (with QSFP+ to SFP+ adaptors) since we do have extra ports on the Netscouts.