Ubiquiti Switching

[Bob_the_Goon]

Are there any Edugeekers at BETT on Thursday or Friday that have experience of using Ubiquiti switches on their school networks?

 

Fancy a 10 minute chat and a coffee? [emoji6] I'd love to discuss Ubiquiti with you as I'm very interested in switching to it for my core networking.

[richbrowncardiff]

yes by all means im on the edugeek stand E150 for an hour tomorrow Morning from 10-11 ish if you cant see me then pm me and I can meet you later in the day.

[m25man]

Ubiquiti Unifi is not really a Core switching solution.

It has no Layer 3 functionality and no stacking capability.

The warranty is woefully inadequate for enterprise use but,

It’s cheap and intuitive to use and the management is easy peasy.

Once they address these issues it might have a place in a distribution cabinet, until then keep it at the edge where it works well.

I’ve got some smaller sites where the 16 port SFP is used as top of rack distribution and 24/48 ports service edge cabs it works well enough.

 

There are some recent reports of these things burning out recently but all the evidence I’ve found points at overloaded 24v Passive APs running off them.

[Bob_the_Goon]

yes by all means im on the edugeek stand E150 for an hour tomorrow Morning from 10-11 ish if you cant see me then pm me and I can meet you later in the day.

Cheers Rich. See you there.

[Bob_the_Goon]

Ubiquiti Unifi is not really a Core switching solution.

It has no Layer 3 functionality and no stacking capability.

The warranty is woefully inadequate for enterprise use but,

It’s cheap and intuitive to use and the management is easy peasy.

Once they address these issues it might have a place in a distribution cabinet, until then keep it at the edge where it works well.

I’ve got some smaller sites where the 16 port SFP is used as top of rack distribution and 24/48 ports service edge cabs it works well enough.

 

There are some recent reports of these things burning out recently but all the evidence I’ve found points at overloaded 24v Passive APs running off them.

Thanks @m25man. I'm thinking about keeping Cisco for the core layer and saving money on the access/distribution layer. To be honest even the larger Cisco environments I've worked in still did all of the routing at the core layer even though the access layer switches were capable of doing it.

[localzuk]

Ubiquiti Unifi is not really a Core switching solution.

It has no Layer 3 functionality and no stacking capability.

 

That isn't true at all. The Layer 3 solution in Unifi is to use one of their Security Gateway products. It isn't built into a switch, sure, but the capability is there if you want it. They've even brought out another, larger, model recently that can handle 80Gbps (the old models could handle 3 and 4Gbps)

The warranty is woefully inadequate for enterprise use but,

 

When you compare the cost of the units to HPE or Cisco (and include the cost of effective management), warranty is somewhat irrelevant - just buy some spares. Its why I have 4 spare units on a shelf.

It’s cheap and intuitive to use and the management is easy peasy.

Once they address these issues it might have a place in a distribution cabinet, until then keep it at the edge where it works well.

I’ve got some smaller sites where the 16 port SFP is used as top of rack distribution and 24/48 ports service edge cabs it works well enough.

 

We now run Unifi in 3 first schools, 2 nurseries and a middle school. The middle school is also our central site, which already had a HPE core in place (5406R) so that's handling layer 3 there, but all the others are Unifi only.

[Bob_the_Goon]

Some of the Edge switches have L3 routing capabilities however this is just plain static routing.

[Bob_the_Goon]

@localzuk do you use Unifi for any of your access layer switches in your middle school or is it fully HP?

[localzuk]

@localzuk do you use Unifi for any of your access layer switches in your middle school or is it fully HP?

Yes, the access layer is entirely Unifi, as is distribution layer. 12 switches of various types, all connecting back to a 16-XG, which then connects up to the HPE 5406R.

[supportman]

Been using the 10gbit switch in our core for a few months and its worked brilliantly so far. Blazingly quick and for 500 quid you can't go wrong!

[DavidYoung]

That isn't true at all. The Layer 3 solution in Unifi is to use one of their Security Gateway products.

We now run Unifi in 3 first schools, 2 nurseries and a middle school. The middle school is also our central site, which already had a HPE core in place (5406R) so that's handling layer 3 there, but all the others are Unifi only.

 

For your UniFi only schools, do you use the USGs in NAT mode or just routing? I think I read that if you want to disable NAT you need to upload custom json files, is that correct?

[localzuk]

For your UniFi only schools, do you use the USGs in NAT mode or just routing? I think I read that if you want to disable NAT you need to upload custom json files, is that correct?

We're slightly different here - none of our sites have routers - our central 5406R handles it for the entire Trust, as our sites are connected by ethernet PTP connections (so basically its all just one big network). If we didn't have the 5406R, I'd have one of the new USG XG's doing it instead. We only use the core as a inter-vlan router though. The edge is a Sophos UTM.

[DavidYoung]

We're slightly different here - none of our sites have routers - our central 5406R handles it for the entire Trust, as our sites are connected by ethernet PTP connections (so basically its all just one big network). If we didn't have the 5406R, I'd have one of the new USG XG's doing it instead. We only use the core as a inter-vlan router though. The edge is a Sophos UTM.

 

Ok, thanks. So you don't use USGs at your remote sites? Do the Sophos UTMs handle the routing? I'm just wondering if a USG could do the L3 on our networks but we don't NAT as we are on LGfL WAN.

[localzuk]

Ok, thanks. So you don't use USGs at your remote sites? Do the Sophos UTMs handle the routing? I'm just wondering if a USG could do the L3 on our networks but we don't NAT as we are on LGfL WAN.

The 5406R handles routing internally (so inter VLAN routing). Our Sophos UTM handles internet routing.

 

I did buy some USGs to put in, but changed my mind to reduce complexity (we have 1Gbit links between all sites, so there's no worry about things being slow for us).

[DavidYoung]

The 5406R handles routing internally (so inter VLAN routing). Our Sophos UTM handles internet routing.

 

I did buy some USGs to put in, but changed my mind to reduce complexity (we have 1Gbit links between all sites, so there's no worry about things being slow for us).

 

OK, thanks.

 

We have some of the switches but would definitely like to put more in as they are just super easy to manage and great value. We're also looking at their WiFi solution for a site-wide upgrade later this year (60 APs)

[Obzen]

Ok, thanks. So you don't use USGs at your remote sites? Do the Sophos UTMs handle the routing? I'm just wondering if a USG could do the L3 on our networks but we don't NAT as we are on LGfL WAN.

 

I moved over to unifi last year, can't fault it as of yet. I'm planning on buying a USG-PRO-4 or possibly the XG version and see how I get on as we are with the LGfL too.