So I’ve finally navigated the Brocade desert and have found the promised land.
- 6450-48p was the first switch that I ordered. It worked perfectly but I suffered from a bit of a layer 8 issue here. I didn’t do my homework and discovered this switch doesn’t support dynamic IPv6
- 6650. I ordered this for a bit of a different project. This switch was DOA and immediately RMAd.
- 7250-24p #1. Since I was looking for dynamic routing on v6, this seemed like the obvious choice. This one arrived with obviously fried ports (lights stuck on), and no working POE. It took me a while to figure out because I had to hack out the cable. RMAd.
- 7250-24p #2. Despite being “fully tested”, this switch had a bad POE board. To make things worse, it tried to start a fire while I was trying to troubleshoot with the seller. If not for the fire attempt, I might have kept it because POE wasn’t a deal-killer for me. RMAd.
- 7250-24p #3. The eBay seller had listed this wrong. It was actually a 7250-24G. No 10Gb, no routing, I didn’t even take this one fully out of the box before RMAing.
- 6610-24pe. And this point I was sick of the 7250 problems, and tried this switch. Despite mentioning POE all over the listing, and “all ports POE fully working”, what was delivered was a 6610-24-PE, not a 6610-24P-PE. I’ll definitely cop a bit to being a bit of a layer 8 issue here. I believed the listing, but I also didn’t know the difference between P-PE and just -PE. Went right back into the box once someone here pointed this out. I was a bit thankful because with one PSU, this bastard was LOUD. RMAd.
- 7250-24p #4. FINALLY. A fully working switch. I paid a bit more, but this is a super clean switch.
It’s definitely been a journey, but I really do love these switches. The 7250s are especially nice as they eliminate dumb things like the `dual-mode` ports.
Thanks to the people here that have helped me along the way, especially through the layer8 problems, and especially to
@fohdeesha for all the work he’s done on these things.