Primus

As can be seen from many posts on here, it's never as simple as AAAA vs BBBB and context is key. If you're saying your requirements aren't met by Unifi that's fine but maybe clarifying that you don't work in a school would be beneficial.

It was more we were talking about them in the context of a school and you gave reasons why they're not suitable for you but your post didn't make it clear that you don't work in a school.

I didn't take offence but I was interested in your reasons for discounting Unifi and they make sense but without the context I wonder if they could have led others on here to think that Unifi wouldn't be suitable for their school.

Out of interest, what type/size is the organisation?

In terms of stacking - it depends what you're trying to acheive, if say you have limited fibre uplinks to a remote location and stack the switches to make use of them you can do the same thing with Unifi by uplinking the switches with DAC cables. If it's for management then stacking isn't really relevant since you're going to manage them through the web UI. Are you doing your L3 routing at the edge?

We've got primary schools and secondary schools using Unifi for edge switching and WiFi - in total around 90 switches and over 330 APs. We tend to use HPE/Aruba at the core. Out of the 90 switches we've had one die within a week that was replaced under warranty and 1 AP die due to someone throwing a bucket of water over the floor above. Other than that no hardware failures though we do keep a small central stock of replacement equipment and given the cost of it all even having cold spares it's still much, much cheaper than brands like Aruba. It's perfectly fine to analyse your requirements and say Unifi doesn't meet them - but you'd hope this was more than just "Unifi isn't enterprise and Aruba is". We run reasonably complicated networks with a number of vLANs, RADIUS in use etc and we've never once thought "I wish I'd gone with Aruba as Unifi can't do X" - but that's just us. I do agree with a previous post that there's a level of network snobbery relating to Unifi. We recently had Connect the Classroom DfE funding at one of our secondary schools and were able to get them to accept a derogation from their requirements - we've put in Enterprise 48 port PoE Unifi switches and Unifi U6 Enterprise APs - we couldn't be happier. I'm also surprised at a comment relating to governors insisting on implementing Aruba - this is getting into the operational sphere and governors are meant to stay in the strategic. It does also depend on your experience and expertise (and that of the wider team) - if you're happy implementing stuff yourself or you need assistance etc.

We're quite big fans too!

We have a fair few - mainly primaries with limited ports in the classrooms. I really wouldn't be putting in or using 100mb passthrough phones now - anything we've put in has been gigabit passthrough. We've had no issues - we have a few older handsets in one school that are only 100mb but I'm looking to replace those.

We also had a trial before buying which was very flexible - this was recent too.

Must be like Stockholm Syndrome.

True but blindly accepting money can harm an organisation, it worries me that EduGeek are so willing to accept SB as a sponsor, have them speak at conferences etc - it allows SB to play upon this, it's all marketing and ultimately EduGeek are being used by SB for commercial gains whilst SB provide a terrible standard of service to schools over a very extended period.

There are a few things surprising relating to this, none of them are that SB are still offering a poor level of service, a couple of the surprising things are: 1. They still have customers 2. They're still a sponsor of EduGeek

You'd be shocked at how many schools have a free for all when it comes to 3rd party apps - sending staff and student data here, there and everywhere without any proper overview. You'd also be shocked at how many schools still don't use MFA - I know of one large Catholic MAT in the NE who don't have forced MFA for staff on M365.

Is it wise to keep growing the complexity and dependency on SIMS when its future is in question? As others have said when they eventually launch their new product (in about 2035 if they still exist) it'll be the exact same situation - you'll have to migrate everything, things will break, not be the same etc and you'll be stuck on their timeline. RDP is the single biggest ransomware vector - being able to close that hole is quite a big one.

I know every school is different and an MIS is a very important part of lots of workflows etc. but I seriously find that hard to believe. We migrated schools from SIMS, Integris and Bromcom to Arbor as part of a MAT standardisation - Bromcom and Arbor are absolutely streets ahead of SIMS. SIMS' market share dropping to barely 50% shows how much they're in trouble - whether you love SIMS or not you now have to acknowledge the very real possibility of it not existing in the future.

It doesn't.

I think you might have missed this bit of his post: Any tips on upgrading a Hyper-V Host from 2016 Std > 2019 Std Std = Standard ie. Server 2016 Standard edition rather than Microsoft Hyper-V Server which is the deprecated one.

Honestly, another own goal from ESS.

That's referring to the free version of Hyper-V Server - most schools will already be licenced for Windows Server which includes Hyper-V through their OVS-ES, EES, perpetual licences etc. Microsoft are not killing off Hyper-V.

Wow, we had to jump through hoops to get our Unifi spend approved. I dread to think what our spend would have been with Meraki or Aruba considering it was circa £300k with Unifi.

Same issue here, thanks for a wonderful Monday morning Smoothwall.

You'd think they'd fix that wouldn't you?

Honestly, don't do this - MS themselves have said they may break updates without warning on unsupported hardware. You're only making a rod for your own back - 2nd Gen Intel Core CPUs are ancient now, it's time to be replacing those. For context we still have a lot of 4th gen Intel Core CPUs going so-so (they were ok until this year where their age is really now showing) - they will all be gone in the next few months.

As good as file conversion is, the number of documents that will break is why it's not really a viable option IMHO. I'd be looking at something that's properly Google native.

As others have said previously - I'm not sure this is as convincing as you seem to think it is. The long and short of it is - MAT that didn't evaluate their needs and the market jumped to a new MIS only to find it didn't fit their needs and has now jumped to yet another new MIS.