UniFi from the home into the school

[Jaan]

 

Hey everyone,

I recently kitted out my home with some UniFi prosumer gear to "have a play" with the ecosystem, and I’ve been seriously impressed with the ease of use and the depth of the UniFi Site Manager. It’s reached a point where I’m considering bringing the brand into our school environment for our next refresh.

I’m curious to hear from others who are running UniFi at scale.

 

I bought a router, 4 switches and 4 APs for home. (4/8 port switch versions, an AP on each floor and one in the garden office)

 

How many of you are running unifi all the way through in your schools? I’m looking at going unfi (eventually):

Firewall (efg) -- Core Switch -- Edge/Access Switches -- APs

If you are UniFi:

• How is the inter-VLAN routing performance holding up at the core/router?

• Do you find that having that "single pane of glass" for everything from the gateway to the port level saves you significant time on a daily basis?

•  

Alternatively, are any of you running a Hybrid setup? (e.g., keeping a different brand for your Core/Firewall but using UniFi for the edge and wireless). If so, have you run into any "gotchas" regarding setup and config? Our wifi is due soon, so was thinking of getting a low port count unifi switch for the unifi APs and uplinking into our existing FS.com edge switches..... 

 

I’m particularly interested in the EFG. For a school environment:

• Is anyone using it as their primary edge security?

• How does the NeXT AI Inspection and SSL decryption handle the heavy load of student devices?

• Is the 25G throughput providing enough headroom for your internal 10G/25G fiber backbone?

 

Having enjoyed the gear at home, my main concern is "real word" operations in a school. Does the stability hold up when you move from 10 devices to 1,000+? Are you comfortable relying on UniFi during state testing windows or high-stakes events?

 

I’m really leaning toward the brand because the value proposition is hard to ignore, but I’d love to hear from those of you already in the trenches.

What UniFi gear are you running in your schools, and is it a total UniFi path or a hybrid mix?

 

I’m sorry for composing this in AI.