Switches - What do you have running?

[newpersn]

Hello all, 

 

I would like to know what switches are you running in your cabinets? 

 

Currently have Mikrotik switches running SWOS and they often lock up. (FW on latest release) 

 

Would like to start moving away from these, Would like POE, Muti-Gig for our AP's but unsure if we get budget next year for this... 

[Synkrox]

Core is Aruba 5412ZL

Some HP and now some newer Netgear on the edges. None of it has ever missed a beat (touches wood). Netgear stuff came in keenly priced for good PoE spec and "insight" central management. 

 

Despite having quite a bit of Unifi wifi gear here I swerved it for switchgear, they have quite an "agile" approach to firmware, where i tend to configure it then leave it for a year or more and just want them to shift packets and keep quiet.

[TechMonkey]

We went Ruckus as I have worked with their Wi-Fi before and seemed to make sense to go to a single place for Wi-Fi and networking. Various switches, some high powered, some stacked.  Central management is good and gives great insights, great for tracking down ne'er-do-wells.

[Olliedawg]

Core HP 5406ZL with a spare chassis in the cupboard incase it dies

 

Edge switches are a mix of Netgears & Mikrotiks (24 - 48port 1gbps, all POE)

 

UniFi for AP's with a software controller running on a VM

 

Edited July 1, 2025 by Olliedawg

[PotNoodleTech]

Aruba forced on me by LA.  I don't rate them at all - theyre slower, less reliable, more finnicky, difficult to manage than my 15 year old old Procuve switches, so...... no progress made by that manufacturer.

 

If i was starting from scratch in a school now I would probably look at Unifi as they're getting more enterprise ready by the day and very easy to manage - the interface was already great 5 years ago last time I ran a unifi fleet.  

[sideone]

We're replacing all our old (non-Cyberessentials compliant) Cisco switches with Unifi. Much cheaper and really easy to manage centrally.

[Primus]

Aruba 5406r ZL2 and 5412r ZL2 core switches depending on school size. Unifi edge switching - no dramas or issues over many years.

[DalekSec]

FS slowly moving to UniFi

[Cat_Jam148]

All UniFi here and have been since 2018. Can't knock em' in my opinion.

[CrootUK]

Cisco Catalyst, Nexus & UniFi all replaced with Cisco Meraki now. Final school on Aruba to do soon I hope! 

[newpersn]

We got a 2x Aruba CX 6300M SFP+ switches going in during the summer which will be our core. 

 

Wifi is Cambium. All our APs are either 2.5g or 5g

 

Unfi was near the top of my list and makes sense when they got a 48 port POE+ 2.5g enterprise switch for around £1100. 

 

Not had any issues with Aruba 2500 and 2900 series switches in the past. (Other the switch underpowering a door controller we got 2 IT rooms running though some old 2530 switches and they are more reliable than the Mikrotiks. 

[fiza]

What are people doing for central management of switches where you have netgear , Aruba or HP as per DfE digital standards?

[TheHyperTechie]

UniFi at the core and edge here. 10G fibre links between cabs.

[RedwayNetworks_Michael]

15 hours ago, fiza said:

What are people doing for central management of switches where you have netgear , Aruba or HP as per DfE digital standards?

Aruba Central for Aruba 

For Netgear i believe its Insight Cloud portal for there central management but i dont do much with Netgear so someone else might know better on that. 

 

 

[russlp]

We're just about to go Unifi here, core and edge.

[MCPearson]

Have an absolute mess of Netgear, HP Procurve, Meraki, Dell and Ubiquiti gear here, some approaching 22 years old. Everything except the Meraki kit is going this summer as its a nightmare to manage, half of the gear won't take firmware updates and I'm just waiting for some big hardware failures. Only reason we're going Meraki is because the core and wireless are Meraki and were given to us as part of Connect the Classroom.

[MatthewL]

Have used HP and Aruba and would be my choice, moved onto Unifi which are far cheaper but I think they lack some features to say HP or Aruba.  All depends what features you want out of them, the Aruba licensing for central management isn't cheap I don't think so bear that in mind.

[mdrabble]

Bulk of edge switches are UniFi EdgeSwitch Max all 1gb port except for 10gb SGP+ to coren (non cloud version) POE and non POE version.  
 

Last year purchased 4 UniFi USW-ENTERPRISE-48-POE switches and their WiFi U7 Pro APs.

 

Desktops are 1gb

APs are 2.5gb

All switches are 10gb back to core.

 

 

[kierans]

We’re currently a mix of Dell and Aruba. Will be standardising WiFi and switching on Aruba though due to a DfE rebuild.

[Bedders]

Not a school, and one office, so not really comparable to most people here.

That said we've just implemented some HP Aruba 2930f switches stacked for our core, 2 x 1 GB links between each of them, which is plenty for our site. We can expand to up to 10 switches in the stack using almost any Aruba switch and they're easy to manage. 

[nicholab]

I run HP ProCurve, Cisco, Netgear and Unifi.  Today I would go unifi as the centralised management is straightforward, they have not missed a beat, and we see 600 Gbytes to 1 Tbytes of data transferred through our core switch per day.

[newpersn]

Anyone running cambium switches? These have been recommended to us as well. But no 24/48 port muti-Gig switches yet. 

[RedwayNetworks_Michael]

11 hours ago, newpersn said:

Anyone running cambium switches? These have been recommended to us as well. But no 24/48 port muti-Gig switches yet. 

Multi Gig switches due September 24 ports 

the 48port ones i think will be next year some time if at all, the 48 port ones they planned to release was only 24 multigig ports anyway. 

 

The new 24 port multigig switches will be a 3030MP 

 

not sure how much of this is supposed to be known but hopefully this helps 

 

Ill let others talk about there experience running the switches

[Aprice]

Lots of Aruba - mix of CX and the AOS (Procurve flavour)

Doing an install in a few weeks with Unifi at the edge and Aruba at the core. 

[itskdog]

15 24-port Meraki switches + a spare in case one fails so we're not waiting for an RMA to bring the devices connected back online.

 

Our (also Meraki) APs are connected to xGbE ports, clients to GbE ports, server to fibre cables via SFP with 2 per VM + 2 for the host, each one an aggregated link.

 

Switch stacks are linked between floors by fibre/SFP, also.

Edited July 15, 2025 by itskdog