Monday, December 21, 2020

Advice on switch please

Hello redditers,

I'd kindly ask for your advice regarding the choice of a network switch to upgrade our existing "core". I used quotes as we are a small company, only 30 employees, but we do have a need for speed. On a budget. :)

So, with those new switches, I'd need to connect a bunch of users and 3-4 servers, latter requiring hi-speed and hi-availability that would need at least 40gbe. If possible, I'd like to achieve this with 2 swithes only. I planned to buy Mellanox NICS (QSFP or SFP28, depending on switch choice) for servers.

Ideally, new switch should support/have:

  • stacking (or virtual chassis, or vPC, ...)
  • Vlans, Vlans trunking, LACP / port channel, basic QoS... and that's it
  • 48x 10GBase-T access ports (this is to future proof the investment, currently we could live with 1Gb ports)
  • 4x-6x QSFP+ 40GbE / 100 Gbe ports (currently, we could live with 4x 40Gbe)
  • letter to Santa would include option to channelize those QSFP ports - that would enable us to use limited count of QSFP ports more efficiently
  • GUI (please don't ridicule me, I am also a sales person, accountant, coach,... :)
  • ideally price below $2500 per piece, (refurbished, used, off ebay, everything works)
  • no additional costly licenses or monthly subscriptions

Candidates that I was contemplating:

  • Juniper EX4300 seems like a perfect fit for this moment in time, it's got jweb, 4x 40GbE QSFP, but with "only" 4 QSFP and 1GB access ports, there is zero space for growth
  • Juniper QFX5100 is close to perfect, but to my understanding doesn't support jweb
  • Arista 7050t-64 is close to perfect, but lacks gui (well, it has CloudVision for a monthly subscription of $145 per switch, which we can't justify)
  • Cisco Nexus N3K-C3172TQ-10GT and CISCO N9K-C93108TC-EX can be bought surprisingly cheap off ebay & seem to be close to perfect, but I can't definitive answer if they can be managed with DCNM in unlicensed mode
  • Dell EMC S4048T seems like a good fit, but Dells, Brocades, Mellanox don't get too much love here for some reason

Our config is fairly static, so I could bite the bullet and configure it via cli, with learning curve, trial & error, sweating, cursing and all, but this is not preferred option. :)

Any advice? And big thanks in advance, your input is greatly appreciated.

Andrej



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