Help choosing a managed switch

[Switcheroo]

TL;DR

I need help choosing a managed switch. My budget is US$150. I estimate about 20 Ethernet ports throughout the house, but most of them will sit unused most of the time. I believe a used enterprise switch with 24 ports is what I need, but I am a noob and probably don't know better. I care about power consumption, but am not too concerned about noise. I am not afraid of the command line, but have no experience with any router OS.


The long story:

I am moving into a new house and looking to upgrade my network infrastructure and security. I am a bit of a noob when it comes to networking, but I'm not afraid of the command line and learning new things.

The house I am moving into will have 2 cat 6a keystone outlets in each room. Additionally, I will run some cables for ceiling mounted access points throughout the house. I estimate a total of 20 keystone outlets in total. I don't expect to use all of those at the same time, but it would be nice to have them connected to the switch at all times so I can just plug a cable in when needed rather than going to the network closet in the laundry room to change switch ports, so I think a 24 port switch would be ideal.

I want to segment my network as follows:
- home network
- home lab
- Android tvs / tv boxes
- printers and iot
- guest network
- work network (I work from home)

I have an Optiplex 3070 SFF (Pentium G5420) that I intend to use as a router, currently looking into opnSense and VyOS. My network connection will be Frontier fiber 1Gbit symmetrical.

My budget is $150. I have been reading a lot online about switch options and have narrowed it down to the following switches:

- Brocade 6450-48P ~$120 on ebay
- Brocade 6610-24P ~$130 on ebay
- Juniper EX3300-24P ~$150 on ebay
- Aruba S2500-24P ~$150 on ebay

The Brocade 6450-24P seems out of budget at the moment, going for more than $200 on ebay.

I want to be conscious of power consumption. The network closet is in the laundry room, so noise is not as much of a concern. I don't need POE at the moment, but the access points will need power, so it's a nice to have. I don't think I need L3 capabilities, but the homelab has been growing over time and I want to be able to access some things across vlans, including Jellyfin media server and my tv boxes. Finally, I don't need SFP+, but I live in Florida and my house is surrounded by trees, so it would be nice to avoid frying all of my network equipment due to lightning strikes. I have not yet purchased the NIC to use on my router, so the switch decision will influence that purchase too.

Any help here is greatly appreciated.

If anyone thinks I'm overdoing this, I'd appreciate you talking some sense into me. I also understand that a single managed switch is a single point of failure, so if there's an option to use 2 switches with less ports to achieve the same goal within my budget of $150, I'm all ears. I'm not opposed to other switch options either, the ones I listed are just the ones that keep coming up on my Google searches.

 

[abq]

I have the same interest, but wouldn't mind a SFP+ to the garage (considering cheap converter box). A slightly higher budget would bring significantly more capabilities.

 

[nexox]

Some thoughts in no particular order:

Newer/higher performance WiFi APs need PoE+ or PoE++, so older PoE ports may not be worth all that much.

Your router will be able to handle cross-vlan traffic at 1G just fine as long as you don't mind a fraction of a millisecond additional latency.

Also take a look at Mikrotik gear, you'll usually get lower power consumption with a tradeoff of some things like layer 3 performance, which you probably won't even notice in a basic 1G setup.

 

[Stephan]

How about a HP J9028B 18 watts fanless for 20 bucks to get going? PoE will imho overshoot 150 bucks. Latest high power PoE will overshoot bigtime.

Question is, how much data will you move around? If you are a member of r/datahoarder then 10/25 Gbps or the cheap 40/56 Gbps gear might be useful. To watch netflix or even stream a 150 Mbps blu-ray from a share, 1 Gbps is plenty.

Lightning protection for larger network runs via optical and also for electrical is a must-have.

 

[Switcheroo]

I am not a data hoarder, 1Gbps should be more than enough. I will look into the HP and Mikrotik switches, thank you for the suggestions.

 

[nexox]

That HP switch looks pretty solid for the price, a Mikrotik CRS326 is close to $200 new and they don't hit eBay used all that often, on the plus side, you do get two 10G ports, but maybe that's a future upgrade, which leaves you with the HP sitting ready to take over as your backup, to address the single point of failure.

 

[itronin]

@Switcheroo

The Brocade 6450-24P seems out of budget at the moment, going for more than $200 on ebay.

- Brocade 6450-48P ~$120 on ebay

true. so get more ports than 24? about $106USD shipped no affiliation with seller, never purchased from them either.

at this price I might want to just get one as an emergency spare switch!

lightning? take a look at gas discharge tubes or some other technology you believe in. Note they have to be grounded! I can only speak to the observed efficacy as my annual pile of fried equipment or equipment with fried network ports has gone way down since deploying them . Not in Florida but west Texas. I am however a Florida native and very familiar with their T-storms and effect on computing gear. Electricity will find a way in from any nearby ground or tree strike. It simply will.

Consider using shielded and then grounded cat 5e for any interior to exterior cabling and put it on a separate patch panel grounded to the house ground. Use a small inexpensive gig switch with an sfp port for your interior to exterior cables and a fiber uplink between the small switch sfp port and your main switch.

for that matter you should also ground your internal cabling patch panel (or rack) to your house ground too.

for slightly more than your switch budget you can get a 6450-48p, a couple of 1gbe f/o xvers, a fiber patch cable, and a 6430-c12, gdt's will add a bit more I'd consider that cabling budget not network switch

 

[Switcheroo]

true. so get more ports than 24? about $106USD shipped no affiliation with seller, never purchased from them either.

That was my original intention, but I wanted to hear other opinions based on my use-case, and I am glad I did. The HP suggestion covers all my needs for a fraction of the price.

lightning? take a look at gas discharge tubes or some other technology you believe in. Note they have to be grounded! I can only speak to the observed efficacy as my annual pile of fried equipment or equipment with fried network ports has gone way down since deploying them . Not in Florida but west Texas. I am however a Florida native and very familiar with their T-storms and effect on computing gear. Electricity will find a way in from any nearby ground or tree strike. It simply will.

Consider using shielded and then grounded cat 5e for any interior to exterior cabling and put it on a separate patch panel grounded to the house ground. Use a small inexpensive gig switch with an sfp port for your interior to exterior cables and a fiber uplink between the small switch sfp port and your main switch.

for that matter you should also ground your internal cabling patch panel (or rack) to your house ground too.

Right, I plan to use SFP to reduce the risk of lightning damage to the network equipment, and I need to read a bit more about grounding.

 

[WanWizard]

I use a Dell 5524, with a 10G uplink to an ESXi server. As long as it doesn't run hot, is it pretty quiet. You should be able to find one for ~$40.

I use a 4-port PoE injector for my AP's, to avoid having to buy a noisier switch with lots of PoE ports I don't need.

 

[Switcheroo]

I ended up buying a HP Procurve 1810G (J9450A). Now I need to buy a dual SFP port NIC for my sff router to connect to the switch.

Any recommendations for the NIC, the transceivers, and fiber optics cable? I have never dealt with fiber before, so any pointers are greatly appreciated.

@Stephan I'm tagging you here because you suggested the Procurve, so I'm hoping you can recommend a transceiver to go with it.

 

[nexox]

It depends on what exactly your chosen software supports, but dual SFP+ Solarflare S7120 cards are under $20 on eBay and work fine for me in Linux. Intel cards tend to have the most universal support, but there are counterfeits floating around on the used market and the affordable ones tend to need more cooling than the Solarflare.

 

[Switcheroo]

It depends on what exactly your chosen software supports, but dual SFP+ Solarflare S7120 cards are under $20 on eBay and work fine for me in Linux. Intel cards tend to have the most universal support, but there are counterfeits floating around on the used market and the affordable ones tend to need more cooling than the Solarflare.

Thanks for the recommendation. My router is a Optiplex 3070 SFF (Pentium G5420) running Proxmox (Debian). I plan to install either opnSense or VyOS as a VM.

 

[oneplane]

Thanks for the recommendation. My router is a Optiplex 3070 SFF (Pentium G5420) running Proxmox (Debian). I plan to install either opnSense or VyOS as a VM.

Excellent choice

 

[Stephan]

I ended up buying a HP Procurve 1810G (J9450A). Now I need to buy a dual SFP port NIC for my sff router to connect to the switch. Any recommendations for the NIC, the transceivers, and fiber optics cable? I have never dealt with fiber before, so any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Read https://andovercg.com/datasheets/hpe-arubaOS-Switch-Transceiver-Guide.pdf

You want an LC SX (short range 850nm) transceiver that is coded for HPE. There should be a ton if you look for J4858C. That is 1 gigabit. Good up to 400 meters of fiber length.

Nics are more forgiving but just get the same transceiver and an Intel X520. Ports can do 1/10 Gbit/s and card needs a slight bit of airflow.

Read https://www.servethehome.com/what-is-plenum-fiber-optic-cable-what-is-ofnp/ But basically any OM2 or OM3 multimode fiber cable should be ok. There is also single mode fiber, that would be the wrong type. Get a used cable with LC connectors on both end and just use that.

Everything is very old tech, should be very very cheap. Like couple bucks.