As my homelab is growing, it has become time for my first "serious" switch. After a couple of weeks of research, I am feeling ready to push the "buy" button on one of the Brocade models - the sweet spot for me seems to be the ICX6450-24P. My needs:
- 8 PoE 1G ports (these are currently on an unmanaged switch that I could reuse, but would be nice to fit them all on the main switch. SBCs for Consul/Nomad/Vault servers on the same VLAN, so I think it could actually be OK with a shared 1G for them all. PoE budget is pretty low and even 80W total should be more than plenty)
- 3 10G ports (glusterfs servers. I still haven't figured out if I really *need* 3 or if 2 would be sufficient as the third will be a glusterfs arbiter and I haven't figured out if full writes are sent from clients to arbiter if it's reduced to metadata on the client side)
- Min 8 non-PoE 1G ports for other nodes
- Low-power
- Quiet
Now, it seems that either 7150-24P, 7250-24P, or 6450-24P would be reasonable choices here. (6610 disregarded for power and noise). I'm no stranger to fan modding. If I reuse my current PoE switch, I could also fit my current requirements in a C12P, at the cost of easy future scalability. However, having followed the domestic (Japan) and eBay secondary market for the past week or two, it looks like I have to do some tradeoffs. While eBay is an option, domestic would be nicer due to COVID and customs. My options seem to be:
- Domestic ICX6450-24 for ~100$. Reuse current switch for PoE.
- Domestic ICX6610-48P for ~100$. Severe overkill but I'll never (knock on wood) grow out of this.
- eBay International ICX6450-48P for ~180$.
- eBay International ICX6450-24P for ~460$.
- eBay International ICX7250-24P for ~540$.
- eBay International XX50-C12-PD for 200~250$, coupled with a ~160$ MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN for SFP+ ports and current GB switch for SBC cluster.
- Hold my horses and closely watch the markets until something more suitable comes up.
So the main reason why I'm hesitant to go for either of the beefier but cheaper ones are power consumption and noise - the ratings are way higher for 48 port ones, and for 6610 compared to the others. If that is what I can expect under similar load, I'm thinking it *could* still be worth shell out 3x the price for the ICX6450-24P, or settle for the non-PoE version at the cost of needing two switches and not being able to add additional PoE devices (which I could make use of with new SBCs).
Now my main questions:
- Under similar load, is should I really expect power consumption to be significantly higher (around double) for the 48-port versions over the 24 port ones? Can something be done either in hardware or software to disable the higher 24 ports?
- Does the 6610 *have* to be such a noisy and hungry beast-hog compared to the 6450/7250? Can something be done to bring it down in line with the others considering I won't be utilizing near max capacity? The ICX6610-48P for 100$ looks really attractive but I'm afraid it'll end up a source of frustration.