Netgear Switches

[Techdw]

Any one using netgear in schools?

 

Had some good comments about them, but thought I would see what everyone else thinks. Looking at the higher end ones. 10Gig uplink as well.

 

Thanks

 

switches

[win]

I've got some netgear mini switches (4/8 ports) but not for the main switches. I'm curious about the 10Gb ones as well.

[CamelMan]

My predecessor put Netgear pretty much everywhere. Seem fine, reliability has been great (2 switch died in 4 years I've been here, and they looked old when I started!), nothing fancy with the ones we have but do the job.

[Simcfc73]

I am all Netgear here and I have been using them for 10 years, gradually upgrading the switches each year. Only had a couple of failures (not on the core) which were swapped out.

 

I have Netgear M5300-28GF3 & GSM7328S at my core, just running 1Gb though as I cant afford to replace the fibre.

 

Biggest issue is the difference in the CLI commands when configuring them... still after all these years I cannot get my head round the VLAN commands.

[steveg]

I've put in a number of netgear switches in the past, from the cheap gig unmanaged ones up to the layer 3 managed ones with 10 gig uplinks. All have proved to be pretty unreliable, had huge problems at one school, and regular failures across the others, I wouldn't touch them again! Entire network here is hp, and haven't had a single problem.

 

May have just been unlucky, and current kit may be ok, but I'd be very cautious of going back there again!

 

Steve

[Asgard]

We are a full Netgear campus; a Sixth Form College, so not directly similar but shows it can scale.

 

We have their new chasis M6100 as our core, I wrote a post about our setup here

 

http://www.edugeek.net/showpost.php?p=1293051

Edited March 26, 2015 by Asgard

[pow]

I'm Netgear, using the M7100 as a core (24x10GB RJ-45s) and the S3300s at distrubution level, with a few older ones doing access level (most cabs only need a dist switch). Speed is OMGZ, bit of a pain to set up but for cost/speed it's all good.

[NB9457]

All our primary schools use Netgear switches and wireless, don't seem to have any issues with any of them. Easy to set up and reliable for the small networks we use them on.

[m25man]

Fast, Cheap, Good pick any two.

Netgear provide probably the best value per port than any other make and you can't deny them that.

However they have their quirks such as several hardware versions of the same model and none of the firmware is compatible.

Some low priced models barely have enough resources to run the switching yet alone a web GUI so they hang and need a reboot just to manage them.

The top end kit L3 and L2+ is as good as anything but it's less than intuitive GUI frustrates many.

Get your head around them and stick to the better models they will serve you well, buy the cheaper models and you will pay the price later.

 

Quality switches like Cisco and HP will not release a version of firmware that has more bugs in it than the version they are replacing yet I've seen several Netgear updates that do just that.

 

But that's why you pay a premium for top end kit and support packages to match.

 

Nothing wrong with Netgear, you get what you pay for.

[Dos_Box]

I had Netgear switches throughout on a new network I setup and managed about 10 years back. I think, back then, bang for buck they were the best around. My only gripe was that the fans on them were not the quietest and in a low noise environment such as a classroom (well, sometimes!) you could hear them humming away.

And I have to agree with @m25man about the hardware versions. They will make 4 or 5 revisions of the same model all requiring different firmware versions and sometimes the webgui did not show you which ones you had so you had to take a trip behind the server racks with a torch to find out!

Apart from that though they were solid reliable runners which I definately would consider again.

Edited April 1, 2015 by Dos_Box

[Asgard]

All of the newer switches (GSM7352S and newer) will shortly be getting the new overhauled GUI - there beta testing it now on selected models - I'll screenshot our M6100 Chasis tomorrow, which comes with the new GUI as standard but it's very intuitive and lightning quick.

 

The colour scheme /layout looks similar to this nas

 

http://cdn2.itpro.co.uk/sites/itpro/files/styles/gallery_wide/public/netgear_2.png?itok=Jwds3lSS

Edited March 30, 2015 by Asgard

[pow]

My S3300's shipped with the new GUI which navigates nicely, hopefully my M7100 will get said upgrade.

[Oaktech]

I've had nothing but grief from the hotchpotch of switches I've inherited. I have 6 switch locations, 2 of which are HP and have been faultless. I have 3 Netgear switches. One is a 16 port 10/100 un-managed desktop affair and requires a preventative reboot on a Friday afternoon or it will certainly not make it to the following Friday without repeatedly connecting/disconnecting everyone or just freezing. I also have 2 24 port gigabit L2 switches which have been acceptable, but just not acceptable enough for my liking. The Vlan support seems flaky compared to the HP - sometimes (about once a term) the Vlans just stops working and a reboot fixes it. I'm also not keen on the fact they don't support SSH/Telnet management which the HP's do. My remaining switch is a gigabit unmanaged DLink which other than getting red hot for no apparent reason seems reliable.

 

I'm about to (the week after easter) replace all of the switches with HP managed L2 switches.

[pow]

Unless the school is teeny tiny I don't think unmanaged switches have any place in a network.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Our LA put in Netgear FS726TPs and Netgear WAG102s about 8 years ago before I had properly taken over... the switches ran like champs but I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole. Their APs had all died and been replaced at least once in our school, and any more advanced config on the switches was hell because of the bad admin GUI and terminology.

 

I'm on Netgear's BETA programme so we've had a fair few preproduction switches come through us, which seem to be addressing the GUI issues but I still don't really like them.

 

Ripped them out and put HP 2530-24Gs in last summer.

Edited April 1, 2015 by Blue_Cookeh

[DCUK6]

Wouldnt touch Netgear again, especially the GS range.

 

Every single one of our has issues, all on the latest firmware and were brought not too long ago.

 

Go Cisco, more expensive but damn they go on for years.

[diagdave]

Love our netgear solution. Thanks to jszkudlapski we got a great solution that I find very easy to manage. Couldn't recommended it more, has a great feature set.

[Mr_Jiminy]

We have always procured Netgear switches, as well as the Cisco Small Business range, I've always felt they provide a cost effective solution, even more so now with lifetime warranty.

 

Other than running the occasional firmware update, which on the large seem very stable, experiences have been positive.

 

Having said that, we also offer high end HP as well, however not every client has a high end budget to accommodate.

Edited April 7, 2015 by Mr_Jiminy

[pow]

I've had 2 SG300's out of the Cisco small business range let me down in a massive way so I steer well clear of those now.

[altreed]

Hi,

 

We have an dual location, high availability Hyper-V implementation. We use an iSCSI San on one network fabric. We use VLAN to segregate data. Our Core switches are Netgear GSM7228 switches. We have 2x GSM7228 stacked in each location and linked with 2x LAG 10G fibres.

 

We have mostly netgear edge switches (all on the latest firmware) and have been suffering intermittant lagging at the client workstations. The performance has varied over the 3 years this solution has been installed, such that we bought a couple of other switches and lifted all our VLAN traffic off the Core switches. The error messages stopped. Since, we have been advised to remove the GSM core switches and replace with HP. The advisor has done this very process in another school who had similar issues as us with positive results.

 

We use Vlans to segregate our iSCSI traffic and the Netgear core switches have been identified as the root of our performance issues when using Vlans. So just placing an order for HP replacements.

 

Hopefully we will have a fast LAN in 2 weeks time.

 

Edge fabric - Netgear good, core + vlan - not so much.

[cpjitservices]

You cant go far wrong with HP, although @altreed could you use your HP's just at the core and the netgears at the edge of the network for end devices ?

[nikaso]

I'm resurrecting this thread slightly as one of our primary schools has 4 Netgear switches, a GS700 series and 3 x JGS524F , now the GS724TP is managed and we can implement VLANs on it but my question is will the unmanaged JGS switches pass VLAN traffic with their VLAN tags intact ?

[Blue_Cookeh]

I'm resurrecting this thread slightly as one of our primary schools has 4 Netgear switches, a GS700 series and 3 x JGS524F , now the GS724TP is managed and we can implement VLANs on it but my question is will the unmanaged JGS switches pass VLAN traffic with their VLAN tags intact ?

 

Generally, no.

 

You need to tag the uplink port as a trunk, which the other switch wont know what to do with so it'll only pass traffic on the uplink's untagged VLAN.

Edited July 30, 2015 by Blue_Cookeh

[nikaso]

Generally, no.

 

You need to tag the uplink port as a trunk, which the other switch wont know what to do with so it'll only pass traffic on the uplink's untagged VLAN.

 

One of my techs has just told me he thinks the network diagram on Visio I've been given might be wrong and they are managed netgears so fingers crossed! Otherwise it will be ebay time!

[Davit2005]

I've had 2 SG300's out of the Cisco small business range let me down in a massive way so I steer well clear of those now.

 

What happened to them??

 

I bought a SG300 10 port PoE+ jobby for home about 6 months ago after a bit of research, wanted a low wattage layer 3 switch at home to replace the noisy 2910 I had been given, no problems with the switch so far.