HA With switches
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
As far as NETGEAR goes, we avoid anything entry/consumer/pro-sumer. We've only deployed their 10GbE switches and have had good success with them.
That gets a lot of people, I think. They use consumer Netgear stuff and get questionable results. But I've seen only good results from their more high end gear.
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@JaredBusch said in HA With switches:
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
The maker of Linksys (traditionally?) Cisco
Dude, Cisco sold off Linksys in 2013. Pay attention.
Cisco bought them in 2003.As a brand, but they kept a lot of the products in their routing, switching, and VoIP lines. They sold the name, but they kept the products. So old Linksys is now Cisco proper.
The Cisco Small Business Pro series edge (NSA 510/520 series with and without WiFi) and their SG300/SG500 series switches were the result of the Linksys purchase engineering combination.
We've deployed a lot of the SG500x series stackable switches with a few weird behaviours depending on how they are set up. Many of them fronted the disaggregate clusters mentioned above.
Yeah, we see those "Cisco rebranded Linksys" units all over the place. They are awful.
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
MSX1012X
We have Cisco Sg500 500 now. We are upgrading every cabinet link to SM fiber, so we'll need more SFP.
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@scottalanmiller When you say "Their High End Gear" what would that be?
Simply click the "Business" link on their website or a specific range?
I've been looking at the M7100 for core and maybe XS724EM/XS728T for edgeHonestly i'd be happy with either Netgear (also been a fan and not see much issues, we have 2 in the core setup now)
or anything else people think are reliable. -
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
As far as NETGEAR goes, we avoid anything entry/consumer/pro-sumer. We've only deployed their 10GbE switches and have had good success with them.
That gets a lot of people, I think. They use consumer Netgear stuff and get questionable results. But I've seen only good results from their more high end gear.
We live in an era where we get what we pay for. Historically, one could count on purchasing a solid product from pretty much all top tier vendors at all levels.
That is no longer the case.
Example: Dell's included warranty. Ever dealt with the "must troubleshoot/diagnose via phone support" support folks before. Ugh, the pain.
ProSupport with NA techs and at least Next Business Day replacement is worth every penny.Example: There's a very important reason why Ubiquiti's 10GbE switch is sub $1K while a purebred Cisco is orders of magnitude above that in cost. Engineering. NETGEAR catches the middle-lower of the pack in the XS716T series but still has quality engineering involved on both the hardware and software side.
Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir here? I'm sufficiently new enough on this forum to excuse it eh?
I remember standing at the back of the room at Microsoft a number of years ago having the AMG/M versus CTS-V "discussion" with some Blue Badges, my conclusion being CTS-V all the way, though an argument against was exactly this reasoning. A 6-Speed CTS-V Supercharged Wagon is still one of those bucket list items for me. The CTS series is made by Cadillac.
Looking back to the Cisco purchase of Linksys it was a wise move. They picked up a solid crew of folks to produce a pretty good line of products aimed at a huge market: SMB
The major "improvement" was a GUI and the introduction of enterprise grade features in a switch and edge setup destined for that market. The early rebranded Linksys stuff was still theirs and still sucked IMNSHO. But, as mentioned, the Small Business Pro product lines have been excellent though not without a few issues.
For gits and shiggles: https://youtu.be/8SE4YfmlckE <-- Still one of the best produced auto model introduction commercials I've ever seen.
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
There's a very important reason why Ubiquiti's 10GbE switch is sub $1K while a purebred Cisco is orders of magnitude above that in cost. Engineering.
Or Marketing and Name Recognition.
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Anybody has experience with ONIE/WhiteLabel switches? Dell seems committed to it...
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@coliver said in HA With switches:
@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
There's a very important reason why Ubiquiti's 10GbE switch is sub $1K while a purebred Cisco is orders of magnitude above that in cost. Engineering.
Or Marketing and Name Recognition.
Point taken. Indeed, there's a huge volume of dollars and folks involved on that side.
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@Francesco-Provino said in HA With switches:
Anybody has experience with ONIE/WhiteLabel switches? Dell seems committed to it...
I was in San Jose a couple of weeks ago at the invitation of QCT for their one day product showcase event.
They are invested pretty heavily with Broadcom in the ONIE market.
We've deployed a lot of their storage products in cluster settings. They have been a solid go-to for shared SAS settings and soon QCT purpose-built Storage Spaces Direct nodes. They are worth the look.
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
We live in an era where we get what we pay for.
I've found this to be about the polar opposite of reality. Look at operating systems, the free ones are best, the paid ones are worst - not that Windows is "bad", it's just not up to par with paid options, all OSes are pretty decent today, but when the free ones do the best.... Look at networking hardware, the highest cost is Cisco which is often the worst vendor, and the cheapest reasonable ones are often the best. The higher performance processors aren't the most expensive. And on, and on.
I'd say it's more often inverted... you get the opposite of what you pay for.
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
Example: There's a very important reason why Ubiquiti's 10GbE switch is sub $1K while a purebred Cisco is orders of magnitude above that in cost. Engineering.
I'm confused, Cisco engineering is specifically a reason I don't want them in my shops. Even casual in person conversations with Cisco engineering is embarrassing. Cisco gear is expensive because they target the "stupid rich" Adams quartile. They put a high price on garbage to specific target people who believe that price, not engineering, defines quality.
None of Cisco's cost comes from engineering, it's just mark up.
That's why even if they were the same price, I'd take Ubiquiti every time. Cisco is the ultimate example of how you don't get what you pay for. That, and Windows, are the two examples we use most about how you can't use pricing as a guide to quality because it is never so dramatically inverted.
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@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
We live in an era where we get what we pay for.
I've found this to be about the polar opposite of reality. Look at operating systems, the free ones are best, the paid ones are worst - not that Windows is "bad", it's just not up to par with paid options, all OSes are pretty decent today, but when the free ones do the best.... Look at networking hardware, the highest cost is Cisco which is often the worst vendor, and the cheapest reasonable ones are often the best. The higher performance processors aren't the most expensive. And on, and on.
I'd say it's more often inverted... you get the opposite of what you pay for.
There's always going to be exceptions to any rule.
We work with ISPs that deploy Catalyst switches into our client sites. There's one site where the WiFi ISP connection piggybacks off of another ISP's system. The other ISP has an ancient Catalyst that keeps locking up every once in a while. That's one example of an issue with a Cisco product yet it can't be faulted as the switch is probably way more than ten years old. We've got fibre and coax going into that business park so we'll be parking that ISP connection into a secondary role at some point so we've not really pursued a switch change with them yet ...
For the most part though, we rarely encounter issues with Catalyst switches.
But, to back up what is being said the last two hotels in different cities I've stayed in that are the same hotel chain using Cisco Meraki WiFi have been nothing but grief. Whether that particular chain has chosen to leave the on-premises WiFi die or the folks supporting it are not doing a great job or the product is just plain crap is left to be said.
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@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@JaredBusch said in HA With switches:
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
The maker of Linksys (traditionally?) Cisco
Dude, Cisco sold off Linksys in 2013. Pay attention.
Cisco bought them in 2003.As a brand, but they kept a lot of the products in their routing, switching, and VoIP lines. They sold the name, but they kept the products. So old Linksys is now Cisco proper.
The Cisco Small Business Pro series edge (NSA 510/520 series with and without WiFi) and their SG300/SG500 series switches were the result of the Linksys purchase engineering combination.
We've deployed a lot of the SG500x series stackable switches with a few weird behaviours depending on how they are set up. Many of them fronted the disaggregate clusters mentioned above.
Yeah, we see those "Cisco rebranded Linksys" units all over the place. They are awful.
I've got a few
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
We live in an era where we get what we pay for.
I've found this to be about the polar opposite of reality. Look at operating systems, the free ones are best, the paid ones are worst - not that Windows is "bad", it's just not up to par with paid options, all OSes are pretty decent today, but when the free ones do the best.... Look at networking hardware, the highest cost is Cisco which is often the worst vendor, and the cheapest reasonable ones are often the best. The higher performance processors aren't the most expensive. And on, and on.
I'd say it's more often inverted... you get the opposite of what you pay for.
There's always going to be exceptions to any rule.
We work with ISPs that deploy Catalyst switches into our client sites. There's one site where the WiFi ISP connection piggybacks off of another ISP's system. The other ISP has an ancient Catalyst that keeps locking up every once in a while. That's one example of an issue with a Cisco product yet it can't be faulted as the switch is probably way more than ten years old. We've got fibre and coax going into that business park so we'll be parking that ISP connection into a secondary role at some point so we've not really pursued a switch change with them yet ...
For the most part though, we rarely encounter issues with Catalyst switches.
Old is old, anything ancient is going to start having problems either from lack of updates, wear and tear, or just general aging.
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@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
But, to back up what is being said the last two hotels in different cities I've stayed in that are the same hotel chain using Cisco Meraki WiFi have been nothing but grief. Whether that particular chain has chosen to leave the on-premises WiFi die or the folks supporting it are not doing a great job or the product is just plain crap is left to be said.
Yeah, we typically remove Meraki and install Ubiquiti. Customers ask us to fix something and find that the price tag of a new install is often less than keeping what they already have. Meraki typically works fine, but the cost is just absurd.
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@hobbit666 said in HA With switches:
So a close up on the Edge switch there will be 2 cables coming in. 1 from Core1 and 1 from Core2.Do i need to configure something special on the switch or will modern switches just know they are coming from switches that are stacked in HA mode?
So just to confirm my thinking,
Ignoring what the Core switches will be for now. If i have one SPF+ Fibre/Copper from Core1 and other from Core2 going into the two SPF+ ports on the EdgeSwitch and i have Spanning Tree and Trunk them correctly, this should be fine?
As when i compare a Netgear S3300 48 port to the 48 port Edgeswitch there is about £300 difference (Netgear being more expensive). -
@hobbit666 Netgear's matching model would not be the S3300 but the GC752X.
Which is $500, so probably a bit cheaper again.
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@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@hobbit666 Netgear's matching model would not be the S3300 but the GC752X.
Which is $500, so probably a bit cheaper again.
So is that GC752X better than the S3300?
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@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@hobbit666 Netgear's matching model would not be the S3300 but the GC752X
Wouldn't it be the GC752XP model as the EdgeSwitch has PoE
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@hobbit666 said in HA With switches:
@scottalanmiller said in HA With switches:
@hobbit666 Netgear's matching model would not be the S3300 but the GC752X.
Which is $500, so probably a bit cheaper again.
So is that GC752X better than the S3300?
It's at least the model meant to be comparable. It's much newer, as well.
