2.5 GBe switch recommendation

I don't have the experience to recommend anything in this space, but have been looking around for something (unmanaged) with 2.5 Gbit leaf nodes and 10 Gbit trunks.

Netgear has worked well for me in the past.

QNAP seem to have some interesting products.

I'd also be interested in hearing recommendations.
 
so far my preference is
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the price is in CAD $ without taxes.
 
petru garstea said:
so far my preference is
View attachment 15362the price is in CAD $ without taxes.
Click to expand...

I have that CRS305 lying around somewhere. It's a nice paperweight, but as a switch it's absolute crap.
You either have to deal with their RouterOS, which is horribly slow, bug-ridden and has a completely braindamaged interface logic. Oh - and you have to deal with IPtables, which is even more braindamaged...
Alternatively you can run switchOS, which is also slow, buggy, but as it has only very basic capabilities it's not that bad (but still bad). And it is somewhat faster - but don't expect anything above ~8GBps sustained throughput, especially if VLANs are involved (drops to ~6GBps and less is the norm). As usual Mikrotik completely cheaped out on packet buffers, so that thing is also dropping packets left and right if you really want to push some data through it. Mine also went silent ~2-5 times a day for several seconds for no reason even without any real load...
Also this thing runs VERY hot even with optical transceivers - I really don't want to know how hot it gets with copper modules, or if it can even handle the power requirements of 4 copper transceivers...
For small test setups or if you need a portable not-quite-10Gbit switch that can be powered by PoE, it might be OK if you are fine with the price tag flaky behaviour. Otherwise I really can't recommend this thing.

In the last few years I also had to deal with some routerboards and another Mikrotik switch - and the experience has always been the same: You are constantly fighting bugs with that stuff and with every weird behaviour in your network you first have to rule out it isn't some Mikrotik gear that's acting up *again* (and more often than not, it is...). The only benefit: They are dirt-cheap, but for what you get it still isn't cheap enough. So I really can't recommend anything from Mikrotik. True, if you are used to plastic routers that ISPs are handing out, Mikrotik is a step forward. But if you have ever touched some networking gear that is well made and just works you absolutely don't want Mikrotik...


As for 2.5Gbit switches (or 2.5Gbit hardware in general): Don't beat that dead horse. The industry has moved to and beyond 10Gbit already - I have no clue why that crippled 2.5Gbit standard now has been revived for consumer gear....
Depending on how much >1Gbit links you need, just look for some (near)-EOL enterprise switches with 10Gbit SFP+ uplink ports. E.g. Cisco 3750X series (max 2x SFP+) or the old Juniper EX3300 (4x SFP+) can be found really cheap nowadays. I'm also running a stack of 2 3750X and an EX3300 at home.
The Brocade ICX series (8++ SFP+ and QSFP available) are also very popular, but they are LOUD and run very hot (especially the PoE variants) - can't recommend them for a homelab.
The TP-Link ST1008F and SX3008F are often mentioned when it comes to silent/fanless SFP+ desktop switches. The former one is selling as low as ~150$, but they seem to be somewhat exclusive for the chinese market, so you have to get them e.g. via aliexpress. The SX3008F is an 'international model' and even available from amazon. At $220 it's a bit more expensive, yet still a bargain for an 8-port SFP+ L2+ 'smart' switch.


For transceivers I can highly recommend fs.com - we're using their transceivers exclusively in our company network and never had any issues with them. Their switches and access points are also very good (especially for their price point), but might be a bit outside the normal 'homelab budget'.


And finally regarding that Topton appliance: I have 5 of the N5105 4-port variants running with OpenBSD as home network- and VPN-routers. If you buy them directly from china (aliexpress) they cost WAY less than on amazon, and then they are actually really great little machines at that price: I paid only 125EUR per piece without RAM/NVMe (those components are cheaper locally from known brands anyways).
 
store.ui.com

Switch Enterprise 8 PoE

An eight-port, Layer 3 PoE switch. Features: (8) 2.5GbE, PoE+ RJ45 ports (2) 10G SFP+ ports 120W total PoE availability 1.3" LCM color touchscreen with AR switch management Managed with the UniFi Network application: Version 6.3.51 and later
store.ui.com store.ui.com
 
petru garstea said:
about topton appliances, do they come with Intel ME chipset ?
Click to expand...
IIRC those N5105 chips don't support vPro and there are no ME/AMT options in the BIOS nor are those mentioned in the product specs (or intel ark for N5105), so I suspect one doesn't have to worry about that backdoor on those appliances.
 
I have posted elsewhere about my experiences with Topton appliances from AliExpress.

I generally remain positive about their value equation. However vendor support is minimal (to non-existent). And you need to be aware of some "issues".

You need a recent version of FreeBSD to get a working igc driver for the Intel I225/I226 Ethernet chips, and AFAIK FreeBSD does not yet support the Jasper Lake Intel® UHD graphics. That will happen in due course.

I have one appliance running Ubuntu (it supports the I22[56]-V and Jasper Lake graphics), and booting from a USB3 thumb drive. I am very happy with it. For the time being, I run FreeBSD in a KVM VM.

However, my latest appliance has cooling issues with a pair of NVMe M.2 SSDs. Cooling problems are not unusual for these particular SSDs, but they were reporting 80C at idle. That's 10C over their maximum rating! There are mutually exclusive options (because of space constraints) to either fit heat sinks or a 40x40x10 12V fan. I have chosen a PWM fan, but I'm not entirely confident that PWM is a better choice than either heat sinks or a fixed speed fan. I will report on the outcome.
 
Greetings,
The firewall appliance from Aliexpress has been arrived and in a few hours I was able to set it in my home network.
Everything works as it was planned, config

Code: 
gateway_enable="YES"
ipv6_gateway_enable="YES"

cloned_interfaces="bridge0 bridge1 igc0.10 igc0.20"

ifconfig_igc0="up"
ifconfig_igc0_10="up"
ifconfig_igc0_20="up"


ifconfig_igc1="up"
ifconfig_igc2="up"
ifconfig_igc3="up"
ifconfig_igc4="up"
ifconfig_igc5="up"

ifconfig_bridge0_name="wanbridge"
ifconfig_wanbridge="addm igc0.10 addm igc1 up"

ifconfig_bridge1_name="lanbridge"
ifconfig_lanbridge="inet $IP/$CIDR addm igc0.20 addm igc2 addm igc3 addm igc4 addm igc5 up"

defaultrouter="$GATEWAY"

Does anybody have any recomendation to optimize kernel sysctl for this kind of setup ?
 
gpw928 said:
However, my latest appliance has cooling issues with a pair of NVMe M.2 SSDs. Cooling problems are not unusual for these particular SSDs, but they were reporting 80C at idle. That's 10C over their maximum rating! There are mutually exclusive options (because of space constraints) to either fit heat sinks or a 40x40x10 12V fan. I have chosen a PWM fan, but I'm not entirely confident that PWM is a better choice than either heat sinks or a fixed speed fan. I will report on the outcome.
Click to expand...
If you want/need reasonable power consumption and heat dissipation (and working firmware...), don't use samsung. they are absolutely horrible in those regards...
I'm using mainly WD blue in such appliances or e.g. NUCs with limited cooling and they are working just fine while easily having (less than) half the power consumption compared to samsung.

regarding the graphics: scfb will always work if you really want to drag a monitor and keybord to a networking appilance, otherwise just use the serial console. I've set up all of those topton devices via serial console and couldn't care less about the integrated graphics.


petru garstea why and what do you want to "optimize"? is anything not working properly? Usually most tuneables in FreeBSD are automatically adjusting at startup and don't need any intervention (there's actually a recent thread about that here in the forums...). So if nothing is broken, just leave things at their defaults...
 
sko said:
If you want/need reasonable power consumption and heat dissipation (and working firmware...), don't use samsung. they are absolutely horrible in those regards...
I'm using mainly WD blue in such appliances or e.g. NUCs with limited cooling and they are working just fine while easily having (less than) half the power consumption compared to samsung.

regarding the graphics: scfb will always work if you really want to drag a monitor and keybord to a networking appilance, otherwise just use the serial console. I've set up all of those topton devices via serial console and couldn't care less about the integrated graphics.


petru garstea why and what do you want to "optimize"? is anything not working properly? Usually most tuneables in FreeBSD are automatically adjusting at startup and don't need any intervention (there's actually a recent thread about that here in the forums...). So if nothing is broken, just leave things at their defaults...
Click to expand...
I was referring to something like that article - > https://calomel.org/freebsd_network_tuning.html
 
VladiBG
Much appreciated for your input.

I have already ran Iperf tests and I got a decent throughput.

To be specific I am looking for a tool that would generate traffic and show queue distribution.
At the moment I found a python script that comes from bsdrouter project, that script only shows the packet forwarding usage per queues https://github.com/ocochard/BSDRP/blob/master/BSDRP/Files/usr/local/bin/nic-queue-usage
, but I dont know how to generate the traffic to stress the interfaces` queues, perhaps I can run iperf with multiple threads (-P options) and that will be the result that I am looking for.

Please advise.

Cheers
 
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