Switches

[mrbios]

We used to go with HPE Aruba, but these days? All switch purchases are Ubiquiti Unifi.

 

48 port 1Gbps, 4 port SFP+ (10Gbps), 500W POE for £580? Compared to £1340 for the HPE Aruba 2540 JL357A.

 

Basically this ^ for us too.

 

We're spread out over 5 buildings, so in most scenarios i've got an ES-16-XG switch (I'm using the Edgeswitch stuff and adding them to a unms server, rather than the unifi stuff with cloud) then a bunch of ES-48-LITEs + one ES-48-500W spanning off it. One building for example is a 10Gb fibre from core to an ES-16-XG, 5 x ES-48-LITE and 1 x ES-48-500W all connected to the ES-16-XG.

 

Replacing the last of my old HP 2610's and 2650's this year, so we'll be entirely 1Gb to the desktop, 10Gb backbone between each building and the main server room, and most switch connections being 10Gb.

 

Cheap enough that i can have a spare ES-16-XG, ES-48-LITE and an ES-48-500W sat on a shelf ready to go should something fail....and unms backs up all the configs so restoring a device is quick and easy.

Edited March 2, 2020 by mrbios

[Optimus_Primal]

Basically this ^ for us too.

 

We're spread out over 5 buildings, so in most scenarios i've got an ES-16-XG switch (I'm using the Edgeswitch stuff and adding them to a unms server, rather than the unifi stuff with cloud) then a bunch of ES-48-LITEs + one ES-48-500W spanning off it. One building for example is a 10Gb fibre from core to an ES-16-XG, 5 x ES-48-LITE and 1 x ES-48-500W all connected to the ES-16-XG.

 

Replacing the last of my old HP 2610's and 2650's this year, so we'll be entirely 1Gb to the desktop, 10Gb backbone between each building and the main server room, and most switch connections being 10Gb.

 

Cheap enough that i can have a spare ES-16-XG, ES-48-LITE and an ES-48-500W sat on a shelf ready to go should something fail....and unms backs up all the configs so restoring a device is quick and easy.

 

We are also five buildings. I have 35 Cisco Catalyst 2960 100Mbps switches and 21 Catalyst 2960 with PoE.

 

There is a 10Gb backbone so it should be able to handle the faster speeds.

 

Did you encounter any problems running two types of switches? My techs can be very particular and I need to be able to sort through some of the chaff.

[mrbios]

Did you encounter any problems running two types of switches? My techs can be very particular and I need to be able to sort through some of the chaff.

 

No functional issues running two types of switch. My core is, and will remain a HP one (8206zl) for the foreseeable future, and it plays nicely enough with the ubiquiti switches.

 

In terms of setup and management, the ubiquiti stuff is very easy to use, especially on the newer firmwares (speaking from an edgeswitch range point of view, I've not used the unifi ones) as the majority of basic settings such as vlan, stp, ip address, dns, ntp settings are all in a really easy to use web frontend.

 

There's a legacy frontend and a cli with all the more complex settings for doing things like 802.1x etc. but away from the 8206's the switches my endpoints connect to are quite basic in configuration at the moment, there's not much i need to go in there for anymore. Adding them to UNMS is easy too, and you can bulk update firmware from there and backup configurations easily. They also seem to have a nice topology map feature coming in unms now which automatically shows you which port is connected to which switch and so on in a nice little list.

[dgsmith]

How about a few of these?

 

ICT Direct: UK's leading computer refurbisher for Schools and Public Sector - ICT Direct

 

Whilst that is still a very capable switch (and I think a fair way better than our 2520-24G-PoEs, despite being alot older), I don't think it's actually PoE+ (as the PoE+ line is the newer 3500yl that superseded the older gen 3500yl line).

 

Still, £75+vat for a HP fully managed, layer 3, 48 port gigabit poe switch is good, despite it being a grandfather in switch life!

[Optimus_Primal]

Depends on the layout of your network, every wire going to a central point, or multiple small cabinets with one central cabinet?

 

How much Power Over Ethernet do you plan to have in the future?

 

What are your links between cabinets?

 

We currently have 21 PoE 48 port Switches. We have a 10Gb backbone

[Andycat]

What bandwidth are your switches?

 

We have Cisco aswell as part of the BSF 9 years ago. We have a 10gb back bone with 100mbps to desktops.

 

10gb backbone, gig to desktop. 2960s in the main. Also bought some refurb ones as spares from Switchshop, as the newer Cisco we bought aren't as good, especially the "mid range" SG500(?). Terrible.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Andycat

[Optimus_Primal]

10gb backbone, gig to desktop. 2960s in the main. Also bought some refurb ones as spares from Switchshop, as the newer Cisco we bought aren't as good, especially the "mid range" SG500(?). Terrible.

 

We have the same 2960s however only 21 of them have Gig ports the other 35 are 100mbps. Thanks for the heads up about Switchshop.

[Andycat]

We have the same 2960s however only 21 of them have Gig ports the other 35 are 100mbps. Thanks for the heads up about Switchshop.

 

You'll be pleasantly surprised at the cost!

[chazzy2501]

My switches are 100mbps and I am trying to plan when to upgrade them.

What is your personal preference for switches?

 

omg, even my phones are POE+ Gigabit... I use the Unifi products cheap if you want central management. the 48 port switches have sfp+ so you could reuse old fiber to get 10Gig in places. (I have OM1 fiber but some run are short enough to allow 10gig) The 10gig fiber transceivers are about £30 a pair!

 

I have 1 of the 750watt POE+ switches running 20+ phones (and their buddied PCs) and 10 APs

[mavhc]

Of the people who upgraded their backbones to 10Gbps, what percentage of the day are they using more than 1Gbps?

[ITGURU]

I've replaced 2 networks of HP 10/100 with D-Link gigabit switches. all run solid, never skipped a beat. You'd be surprised how many schools may still be running 10/100. i upgraded one school 2 years ago, and know of another school that replaced theirs last year to gigabit!

[3s-gtech]

I can answer that one, as we’re about to go 10Gbps. The answer is: never, and not even close. 1Gb links to the core are seeing a maximum of 15% utilisation, and sitting at 2% or so during the day. We have a large site with lots of cabs.

 

Oh well. We’ll be using the old infrastructure for CCTV so it’s not money wasted.

[ITGURU]

I can answer that one, as we’re about to go 10Gbps. The answer is: never, and not even close. 1Gb links to the core are seeing a maximum of 15% utilisation, and sitting at 2% or so during the day. We have a large site with lots of cabs.

 

Oh well. We’ll be using the old infrastructure for CCTV so it’s not money wasted.

 

We're on 10gb uplinks to core aswell. Granted most of the time utilisation is low, i can definitely see the performance benefit when pushing out software or updates, i've seem utilization at 3-4gb on traffic monitoring as servers have 4gb connections.

[mrbios]

Same here really, not really capping out 1Gbps let alone 10Gbps.

 

I'm standardising on Ubiquiti switches, so the reason i have 10Gb backbone is basically this: It's standard on all their 48 port and aggregation switches. There's no cheap model without it, you don't pay a premium for it, simples.

 

Not many options cheaper than Ubiquiti when you're looking at 48 port PoE+ switches either. Those that are, i wouldn't feel comfortable depending on.

 

I am consistently using over 1Gbps on my iSCSI network though, but that's separate.

Edited March 3, 2020 by mrbios

[DrCheese]

I'm guessing you guys who are using Ubiquiti switching have enough fibre runs to plug in one fibre per switch? At the mo I get away with 2 fibre links per cab even tho I have say... 3/4 switches in 1 because they're in a stack

[mrbios]

I'm guessing you guys who are using Ubiquiti switching have enough fibre runs to plug in one fibre per switch? At the mo I get away with 2 fibre links per cab even tho I have say... 3/4 switches in 1 because they're in a stack

 

My wiring basically goes: core > 10Gb fibre > ES-16-XG > 10Gb Fibre to all other switches in the rack. For 3 of my buildings that's easy because all cabling in those buildings goes back to one central point, and those are the 3 that I've already replaced with ubiquiti kit.

 

I'm planning the more complicated, multi cab, cable mess, two buildings for this year. Though i may just end up with 1Gb copper between many of those because it's just not worth running fibre for the amount of devices I'm serving on them.

[Norphy]

Of the people who upgraded their backbones to 10Gbps, what percentage of the day are they using more than 1Gbps?

 

For some of them, quite a lot actually, maybe around 15% of the day. HOWEVER the switches that are regularly exceeding 1gbps on their uplinks are big chassis switches rather than 1U switches so there are anything up to 280 ports on a single switch, rather than 48.

 

In that instance, a 10gbit backbone is justified. For smaller switches, maybe not.

[DrCheese]

My wiring basically goes: core > 10Gb fibre > ES-16-XG > 10Gb Fibre to all other switches in the rack. For 3 of my buildings that's easy because all cabling in those buildings goes back to one central point, and those are the 3 that I've already replaced with ubiquiti kit.

 

I'm planning the more complicated, multi cab, cable mess, two buildings for this year. Though i may just end up with 1Gb copper between many of those because it's just not worth running fibre for the amount of devices I'm serving on them.

 

Ah thanks, so do you have dual links from core or just have the single link/single device core ?

[mrbios]

Ah thanks, so do you have dual links from core or just have the single link/single device core ?

 

Capacity for dual links is there, currently it's setup as a single device core with a single link out, but i have an identical core switch offline at the moment (only reworked my rack in the Feb half term so that i could fit it in) so intend to set that up eventually.....for the time being, it's basically an offline spare.

[CraigM]

I've got an increasing number of Aruba 2540's in my network, replacing older HP 2610 and 2620 10/100 units. Pretty much all of the fibre backbone links have been upgraded to OM-3, so 10Gbps is available for when I finally get the core replaced. We were actually waiting to take delivery of the 48 port POE 2540 for our school library cabinet before our country basically went on lockdown. I doubt we will ever get near to saturating a 10Gbps backbone link, but the cost of the fibre is so cheap these days that it made no sense not to have it installed.

 

In this day and age, GB really should be the minimum everywhere. 100 meg will work, but you feel the pain when you are cloning PC's or waiting for large updates to download. Also, Wi-Fi AP's really like as much bandwidth as you can throw at them.

 

If I had to start over tomorrow with a clean slate, I'd seriously consider the UniFi kit, just for the controller and price alone. The HP/Aruba kit is absolutely rock solid, stable and amazing guarantee, but it doesn't come cheap. The only thing the UniFi range doesn't do at this point really is a chassis core switch. I reckon that if Ubiquiti comes out with those and they are reliable and perform well, networking vendors are going to tremble in their boots.

[ITGURU]

I replaced all our 10/100 HP kit with D-Link 10GB backbone, 1gb edge switches about 13 years ago. HP still seem to work on 'chassis core switches' However, D-Link whilst I have chassis switches at the moment, they have moved onto a 'top of rack' or 'stacking topology'. In my mind having just replaced another schools' HP 5406 ZL core with a 4 x D-Link switch stack, I actually prefer this method.

It means that you can lose a whole switch and there will be no impact. Teamed connections across multiple switches will still use the remaining links connected to the other switches and the failing switch can be replaced.

A chassis failure basically means your whole network goes down if the actual chassis or CPU card fails.

[Norphy]

I replaced all our 10/100 HP kit with D-Link 10GB backbone, 1gb edge switches about 13 years ago. HP still seem to work on 'chassis core switches' However, D-Link whilst I have chassis switches at the moment, they have moved onto a 'top of rack' or 'stacking topology'. In my mind having just replaced another schools' HP 5406 ZL core with a 4 x D-Link switch stack, I actually prefer this method.

It means that you can lose a whole switch and there will be no impact. Teamed connections across multiple switches will still use the remaining links connected to the other switches and the failing switch can be replaced.

A chassis failure basically means your whole network goes down if the actual chassis or CPU card fails.

 

The 5400R chassis has a redundant management controller option, which was admittedly absent from the plain 5400. Along with multiple redundant power supplies and modular ports, I’d personally say that a modular switch is the way to go but there are advantages to both approaches.

 

The other thing to say that at the level we’re taking about here, in HP’s range there are chassis and 1u versions of each switch. For example, the 5400R and the 3800M are the same switch in different form factors

[ITGURU]

The 5400R chassis has a redundant management controller option, which was admittedly absent from the plain 5400. Along with multiple redundant power supplies and modular ports, I’d personally say that a modular switch is the way to go but there are advantages to both approaches.

 

The other thing to say that at the level we’re taking about here, in HP’s range there are chassis and 1u versions of each switch. For example, the 5400R and the 3800M are the same switch in different form factors

 

True - no one solutions fits all - the 5400R does look like a better option if your replacing core, and switch stacking also suppots redundant power supplies so its horses for courses

[mavhc]

RAIS Redundant Array of Inexpensive Switches?

[Davit2005]

Can't imagine having 100MB switches only in 2020!

 

I personally stick to HP for the school, they're pretty inexpensive, web-managed (no CLI for the 1920 switches) but have a nice lifetime warranty which I've had to use in a couple of cases. Out of the 100+ HP switches I've looked after in a few schools, I've only had to warranty replace about 2 and it was a case of explaining the issue to HP and they sent out a replacement next day.

 

I could surprise you. We have about 700 switches and about 25% are 100Mb. I cannot fault HP/Aruba warranty, we have 100+ ProCurve 2650's and a few 2810's and these are still being replaced within a few days if faulty.

 

Touch wood, we have not had to replace any HP/Aruba switches that we have installed in the last 3 years and we have installed easily 200+ in 3 new builds and 2 Major refurbs.

Edited April 15, 2020 by Davit2005