Sunday, October 7, 2018

Whitebox LAB switch?

TL;DR: Are there any small cheap 4 to 8 port switches that can run the common open source switch OSes or Cumulus Linux? Good learning resources? Looking to learn more about it.

I'm in the early stages of planning a switch upgrade for our (very small) datacenter and manufacturing plant. It's currently a flat 1 vlan design, about 20 switches altogether, with STP turned off (!!) (just started here 5 days ago... got lots of work to do).

I'm spec'ing out 10G switches for the core and datacenter ToR, and want to convert everything to a L3 type of design with two ECMP links to each factory building, and probably run OSPF between everything. I like the idea of whitebox hardware + open source software, but don't have any experience.

They currently have old HP ProCurve switches, and Cisco is what I've worked with before.

What do you use to LAB this stuff? What are the best books or other learning resources on whitebox hardware? If you've gone down the whitebox route before, would you recommend it to someone else? Why or why not?



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