10GbE Switch Recommendation for NAS, Virtualization and Heavy Inter VLAN Traffic

Hi everyone,

I’m currently planning an upgrade to our internal network and would appreciate some advice from people running similar environments.

We have several virtualization hosts, a NAS used for backups and shared storage, and multiple VLANs separating servers, workstations, management devices, and general user traffic.

Most of the network is currently 1GbE, but large backup jobs and VM transfers are increasingly becoming a bottleneck. We’re considering moving the core server and storage connections to 10GbE while keeping normal endpoints on 1GbE.

The part I’m trying to plan correctly is inter VLAN traffic. A lot of large transfers happen between the workstation VLAN, server VLAN, and storage VLAN, so I don’t want to install 10GbE switching only to discover that routing between those networks becomes the limiting factor.

For anyone running a similar setup:

Would you handle inter VLAN routing directly on a Layer 3 switch or continue routing everything through the firewall?

For sustained NAS and VM traffic, would SFP plus generally make more sense than 10GBase T?

Is there any practical advantage to using separate storage VLANs when the NAS is already restricted through ACLs?

And when selecting the switch, which specifications matter most beyond port speed, such as switching capacity, forwarding rate, buffer size, or uplink configuration?

I’ve been comparing different enterprise switching options while planning the upgrade, including the networking hardware available through ORM Systems:

https://ormsystems.com/

I’d be interested to hear how others have designed their 10GbE networks without sacrificing segmentation or creating a routing bottleneck.

Thanks.