Netgear M4500 100G switches

[ERDrPC]

Has anyone looked at these M4500 M4500-48XF8C | Fully Managed Switches | Switches | Business | NETGEAR

They seem to be targeting AV over IP. However they have fibre with 10/25/50/100G speeds depending on the model. These could be great top of the rack switches. @Patrick Would love to see a STH review

Also check out: Netgear Advances Professional AV Over IP with Powerful New Switches

 

[james23]

i was able to grab one from ebay for ~$1250 (I think I was lucky on the price, as it's still a current generation switch from netgear's pro AV line, and retails for a little above 15K).

I do a lot of network engineering, and have always liked netgears' managed switches for edge devices. They are well made at the PCB / component level, They do not block firmware releases in any way, and they do not do licensing. Parentheses ie if the switch is capable of it the software supports it from day one).

I do know in terms of audio / video production, audio and video engineers ive come across swear by Netgears AV line of switches, mainly in terms of NDI video , Dante audio or other IP based stage/content production type protocols (as well as multicast usage by the protocols).

I plan on using this switch at the top of my home rack, prior to finding this deal on ebay I planned on buying 1 or 2x of the mikrotik 25/100gb switch: CRS510-8XS-2XQ-IN (which ONLY uses ~ 27w idle).

while this switch is overkill for my use case, I will be running 25GB and a 100GB to my vmware / free nas hardware (truenas).

One annoying thing about this about the m4500 line, for some reason netgear does not publish these switches idle power draw and sound levels, I can tell you from my own testing it's around 127 watts idle and 50 to 55 decibel sound level (pretty quiet for this level of switch!) - NB: this is with both PSUs connected to mains, and NO OPTICS connected at all. so totally idle.

will update in a few weeks when i start To see compatibility with various optics / DACs. ask if have any ? about it

 

[james23]

OUCH - no web gui on this model switch! I incorrectly assumed it would have one in addition to the more advanced commands accessible via CLI.

i may end up listing it on ebay soon, as for a home /work lab type of scenario i do want some kind of GUI + CLI.

So that is a VERY important thing to note! (wish i had discovered that before buying!)

Above is now invalid as of the more recent firmware versions, there now IS a basic web gui! (as of latest FW version: 7.0.3.12)

NB: all docs / spec sheets list that there is ONLY cli access to this switch, So I'm guessing people complained and at some point in the firmware NG added a basic web gui (its actually Netgear's excellent pro -AV web gui see snap below). I was pretty surprised to find no web GUI initially as this is their AV line of switches.
(Also when considering that there is an Intel atom CPU in this switch solely for management, so not having a Web server seemed a bit like a bit of a waste of those resources). It also seems from the console output that the switch is running some type of Ubuntu as the underlying OS, which is pretty cool.

docs menton ONIE and i did deal with ONIE in booting / fw updates via console- I'm not familiar with ONIE but seems to be some kind of open source boot loader for switches)

even a basic webGUI im now good with, As in my scenario I need to be able to quickly check on basic items.

 

[james23]

im attaching the tech-support txt output file , If any are curious of the features this switch offers (quite alot! i did pull out SN and mac-ending ).

Even though the two psus show a combined 100 watts (55w + 45w ), my watt meter is showing 128 watts at idle from the wall (maybe is due to psu efficiency).
and it IS quiet , as i stated above(45 - 50 db ). it def wont be louder than any of the supermicro servers in my rack, Even considering that I've taken steps to keep those 4x servers as quiet as is reasonable.