Managed Switches
-
@Dashrender Yes, how will one make my life easier?
-
@alex.olynyk Could you tell us a bit about your environment? If it's 10 people with desktop computers you might be just fine staying with unmanaged. Managed ones have a ton of features but if you don't need them....
-
@alex.olynyk said:
@Dashrender Yes, how will one make my life easier?
?? what do you mean? How do they make your life easier?
Do you need VLAN? Do you need Layer 3 routing?
Will a smart switch be enough? There are many non managed switches that still allow you to do things like port mirroring and some other basics. So if you don't need more than that - why spend the extra money?
-
This post is deleted! -
@aaron said:
@Dashrender said:
Better question - what feature does a manged switch give you that you need?
VLAN tagging, remote management, etc. What are the reasons to install unmanaged these days?
Cheaper, less things to fail, faster hardware, less to manage.
-
@aaron said:
VLAN tagging,
If your equipment is doing it's own VLAN tagging, an unmanaged switch will pass those tags along just fine. A managed switch allows you to force certain ports into a specific VLAN when not tagged.
-
@MattSpeller we have about 10 offices and about 500 employees
-
This post is deleted! -
Preventing egress? you mean like firewall features? I suppose if you want your switch to do that, fine. But if you don't have that kind of need - yet another reason not to buy managed.
-
@alex.olynyk said:
@MattSpeller we have about 10 offices and about 500 employees
with only 500 employees spread across 10 offices, you don't need VLAN for anything.
You don't need managed switches for anything.
You can easily make use of them for reasons like shutting off ports and a quick remote view when a employee claims their network is slow. You can easily verify link speed.
They are useful to have. They are not required to have for such a small operation.
-
This post is deleted! -
@aaron said:
With 10 offices I would definitely use managed switches, especially for monitoring. I've driven hours before to power cycle a switch.
None of that implies a managed switch. a PDU would be far more useful. You can't really get in to locked up managed switch remotely anyway.
-
@aaron said:
Yes, I meant more about the switch passing on untagged vs tagged like you mentioned, or tagging onto untagged or preventing egress.
But, what actual purpose or business need is that meeting?
-
This post is deleted! -
This post is deleted! -
@aaron said:
With 10 offices I would definitely use managed switches, especially for monitoring. I've driven hours before to power cycle a switch because the local staff didn't do it as troubleshooting when I asked. That's the scenario I would be reluctant to repeat.
This is why i recommend them. I am never on site. I can get into them remotely unless shit completely hit the fan. If it is that bad, I will have someone pulling power cords.
-
@aaron said:
Depending on the business need. OP asked for reasons to use a managed switch. We could dive deeper into routing, hot swappable PSUs, etc. I just mentioned a few reasons off the top of my head.
You have to be pretty high end to have hot swappable PSUs in switches. Even our access layer switches do not use them. I dobut a small company of 500 is getting into hot swappable switch PSUs at all.
-
@Jason said:
@aaron said:
With 10 offices I would definitely use managed switches, especially for monitoring. I've driven hours before to power cycle a switch.
None of that implies a managed switch. a PDU would be far more useful. You can't really get in to locked up managed switch remotely anyway.
And you don't need managed switches for that anyway, Smart switches do that at a fraction of the price. Managed is for when you want that stuff using SNMP tooling, which rarely makes sense in an SMB.
-
@alex.olynyk said:
What are some good reasons to install managed switches?
There are basically two big reasons why they are good:
- Ability to be monitored by standard utilities over SNMP. This way you can collect information in a single spot.
- Ability to manage by standard utilities. Same as above but managing instead of monitoring.
Caveats:
- Cost
- Complexity
-
@anonymous said:
So you can manage them?.......
Actually they are harder to manage than Smart switches until you are at large scale. For a smaller environment, even up to thousands of systems, stacked smart switches get you far simpler management, centralized monitoring and similar features with simple interfaces.
Once you get beyond that, managed does get better, but without that scale (or a lab where you are doing it to learn) the value is quite low.
Many Smart switches have monitoring options too, often it is only the management options that are limited.
