Sonicwall NSa2700 connectivity to modem with 2.5G port
Sometimes when using 2.5G-SFP-T copper transceiver which can achieve 2.5Gbps data rate there could be difficulties. These mostly are related with the compatibility in which equipment they are used. For instance, the Sonicwall NSa2700 is Gen7 Network Security Appliance – Firewall. It has 16x 1GbE ports and 3x 10GbE SFP/SFP+ ports.
In this case the requirement is to use 2.5G-SFP-T transceiver in SFP/SFP+ port. Port which can support 10G transceivers originally.
When plugging the module in the device, an issue arises that 2.5G-SFP-T transceiver is not recognized correctly. NSa2700 yellow test LED would go on for a long time and then off, after which the traffic LED would blink constantly indicating link initialization state. An end device connected to this module would show up as connected, but zero traffic transmitted or received.
The main reason is that the NSa2700 equipment has SFP+ port, which is 10Gbps port. Due to this reason the 2.5G module will not work there! The 10G-SFP-T transceiver is required, which can specifically work in this SFP+ port and tune its data-rate down to 2.5Gbps!
EDGE Optics 10G-SFP-T transceiver is capable of 10G, 5G, 2.5G and 1G data rates. The module has to be used in SFP+ port and through host configuration the required data rate must be selected.
Specifically for Sonicwall equipment there are few points more to take in to account, besides the 10G-SFP-T module:
- SFP+ ports on the Sonicwall equipment have their SFP+ ports set to 10 Gbps by default.
- You can only change the speed AFTER an SFP is put in AND connected to end device.
- The default connection speed for a compatible SFP+ that can’t auto detect a speed is 100 Mbps.
