So I wanna buy a switch....

[RobertFontaine]

After 3 hours on the phone with my service provider on their crippleware cable modem/router I have reached the point of defeat.

I'm likely going to add another 4 physical dual cpu nodes this year (I'm thinking a couple of windmills with 2670's) and I'd like to have at least 2 vlans/possibly 3. lab vlan and home vlan.

I have started having guest traffic into the lab so I have been opening ports. Time for a proper firewall.

I will be virtualizing my server infrastructure and it will be esxi (vmware is ticking all the checkmarks for testing and development of desktop software on vms for us.)

pfsense with a dual ethernet card to a managed 24 port switch. It seems like there are an unlimited number of managed 24 port switches on fleabay for very cheap.

So... What is the best cheap managed gigabit switch to watch for on fleabay? The all look about the same to me... ROMs, Management Interface... Are there any clear winners?

 

[Keljian]

The HP 1810 switches are lovely, cheap and just work. That said, if you can spring for one, the mikrotik CRS226 + a 10 gig card for the pfsense/virtual environment would be better...

 

[tullnd]

I just picked up a few Procurve 2810's for myself and a neighbor. I love them. The fans are a little loud, but not nearly as loud as I expected. Not designed for use in a living area.

Plus the ebay'er let me have the serials ahead of time to run on HP's website. The ones I selected all came back as never registered, so I have the lifetime warranty on them still.

 

[Patrick]

I still use the HP V1910 24 port switches. Inexpensive and work great.

With that said I would also strongly suggest getting one with 10gb ports these days.

Also, 10gbe ports are very inexpensive now. I am likely going to move the DemoEval lab to have only 10GbE+ and use 1GbE only for management interfaces.

 

[RobertFontaine]

Thanks guys... I'm only 150 down 15 up so ip traffic is limited by the cable modem. The extra 10gb ports to the router/firewall seem like a bit of future proofing. I'm still thinking about infiniband as a cheaper/faster solution than 10gbe once I move the disks off of my workstation.

I have developed the rather expensive habit of buying every piece of hardware 5 times. I am doing fine with reselling the hardware but I eat a lot of shipping cost.

 

[fractal]

I love the hp 1800/1810 switches. Cheap, quite and low power. They good enough for a couple of vlans and trunks. I have a half dozen of them spread across my house. I got one of the older metal 1810-8g's for my daughters desk with POE in so I can get rid of the wall wart at her desk if I ever put a POE switch in my hall closet with the patch panel. The newer plastic 1810-8's are supposedly not so nice.

I have a hp 1920 and despise the UI. Freeking thing demands I type a capcha every time I log in and it has a 5 minute timeout. That means I have to find my glasses every 5 minutes to read the tiny capcha to type it in when I am trying to do anything. BLETCH.

It is the switch in my hall closet so it will be replaced once I find a low power switch with a couple of POE's or give up and buy injectors.

The 10G ports aren't for talking to the internet, they are for talking to your ESXi server..

 

[NetWise]

Quick note about the HP 1800/1900 series at least based on my experience. Good general switches. But put some moderate load iscsi traffic on them and they don't have the required packet/port buffers and you get intermittent performance. That doesn't mean they're not great for general purpose network side though.


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[RobertFontaine]

I am seriously considering some longer cables and putting everything with fans in the next room. Creating a rack full of "silent" repurposed enterprise computers seems like a slightly more silly idea every time I take the time to think about it.

I have a little smartboard am70 device on the shelf with a docking station that has enough hdmi ports to take care of my monitors for vms.