Cisco Nexus 5K...good deals on anything better?

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b-rex

Member
Aug 14, 2020
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I'm a Cisco guy. I always have been. Yet for home labs, I'm getting destroyed by their license restrictions and the fact that even used stuff is insanely expensive. I've got 2 5010s and besides the fact that they're insanely loud, run hot, and suck more power than my disk arrays...they're pretty good switches for my use case. However, I've had some weird things happen where they occasionally won't post when rebooting. They are old and were a good deal at the time for 10 Gb. Newer Cisco switches are too rich for my blood but I've been noticing some Dell and HP switches out there that seem reasonable. Any thoughts on them? I have little to no experience with either.

Anyone else have recommendations for decent value 10 Gb switches? I'm looking for simple layer 2 since I have upstream L3 switches controlling most of my routing. I need something compatible with VPC (although pretty sure this will end up being a Cisco only thing) / LACP. I have 26 ports on each 5010 at the moment so I need something comparable capacity wise.
 

alsenior

Member Member
Apr 19, 2016
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You can look at arista. cli is close enough for cisco to sue them and sometomes can be had quite cheap
 

LodeRunner

Active Member
Apr 27, 2019
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Also give the Brocade ICX thread a read, might be some options there for you. I believe the ICX 6k and 7k families support cross unit LAGs in a stack, as long as all stack members are identical switches. But definitely ask in that thread.
 

funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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I'm a Cisco guy. I always have been. Yet for home labs, I'm getting destroyed by their license restrictions and the fact that even used stuff is insanely expensive. I've got 2 5010s and besides the fact that they're insanely loud, run hot, and suck more power than my disk arrays...they're pretty good switches for my use case. However, I've had some weird things happen where they occasionally won't post when rebooting. They are old and were a good deal at the time for 10 Gb. Newer Cisco switches are too rich for my blood but I've been noticing some Dell and HP switches out there that seem reasonable. Any thoughts on them? I have little to no experience with either.

Anyone else have recommendations for decent value 10 Gb switches? I'm looking for simple layer 2 since I have upstream L3 switches controlling most of my routing. I need something compatible with VPC (although pretty sure this will end up being a Cisco only thing) / LACP. I have 26 ports on each 5010 at the moment so I need something comparable capacity wise.
Arista 7050QX-32 / 32S

Love these
 
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b-rex

Member
Aug 14, 2020
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Thanks for the input about Brocade and Arista. Based on what I've seen, I may end up with something like a 7148. Seems like there are some good deals out there. Anything I should know about them? Weird licensing gotchas?
 

oddball

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May 18, 2018
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Arista comes fully unlocked. Licensing is based on the honor system. For a system that old they won’t license it.
 

b-rex

Member
Aug 14, 2020
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Thanks for all the input. Some of the gear I'm seeing is priced really well...and without licensing to get in the way, even more so. The N5K/N2K that I have do not have any of the FC/Enterprise licenses, but layer 2 works well out of the box. Overall, the 5010s and fex's do a good job...they're just power hungry and dying. I have a 4-switch 3750 stack upstream that has onex 10G and IP services that's doing all layer 3 work at the moment so as long as they play nice with the Aristas (and I don't see a reason why they wouldn't), it should be all good. And I'm using other vendor-sourced twinax right now and I haven't had a problem (and twinax is more likely to cause issues when another vendor's transceivers are used). It lit up right away on the Nexus/Catalysts after I issued the command to allow unsupported transceivers, no issues I've noticed. I think most work like that.

Is there actually an unlock "code" or is it just a configuration command?
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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Is there actually an unlock "code" or is it just a configuration command?

Code:
#EOS 4.14.X AND ABOVE:
enable
conf t
service unsupported-transceiver wiprolabs f5047577
#OR (pick one):
service unsupported-transceiver EMC 677096c7
write mem


#old method (for EOS versions before 4.14)
localhost>enable
localhost#bash
[admin@localhost ~]$ touch /mnt/flash/enable3px
[admin@localhost ~]$ sudo reboot
this message will self-destruct whenever patrick sees it
 
Last edited:

b-rex

Member
Aug 14, 2020
59
13
8
Code:
#EOS 4.14.X AND ABOVE:
enable
conf t
service unsupported-transceiver wiprolabs f5047577
#OR (pick one):
service unsupported-transceiver EMC 677096c7
write mem


#old method (for EOS versions before 4.14)
localhost>enable
localhost#bash
[admin@localhost ~]$ touch /mnt/flash/enable3px
[admin@localhost ~]$ sudo reboot
this message will self-destruct whenever patrick sees it
Thanks...that's actually almost identical to NX-OS/IOS. I guess alsenior wasn't kidding when he said Arista's CLI is essentially a carbon copy of Cisco's.