Gigabit network switches: HP Procurve 1810g vs HP Procurve 2510g vs others

[luckylinux]

(I don't know if I'm posting this in the right section. This is indeed related to networking, but concerns more the hardware aspect of it. I ask the moderators to forgive me, should this not be the appropriate place for this thread).

As for the title, I always heard HP Procurve switches were good, so I would like to buy 2 x 24 port switches (or maybe just one to begin with) for use at home.

I plan on using virtualization, therefore VLAN might be useful.
I'm also planning to use Link Aggregation protocol in order to provide some additional speed and redundancy, particularly for my home NAS running FreeBSD .


Now I was almost ready to buy 2 x "HP 1810G-24 v2" switches (22W vs 30W consumed by the v1 model) until I read on the internet that it lacks management features (telnet, SNMP, CLI in general): basically none other than the web interface.

The HP 2510G-24 costs more than twice the 1810G-24 and seems to consume more power and make more noise. I don't know if it could be useful for home use (even though I have lots of PCs and some virtualization servers, it may be just overkill for my needs). AFAIK the HP 1810G-24 seems to offer remote Syslog support, so I could centralize all logging on a single machine, which may be useful to detect some errors / problems.

I don't know if I need / I may need in the future more advanced management features.
The 1810G-24 seems to be described as a "cheap" model (and for 24 ports it's definitively cheap), at least here. I hope more experienced users may help me choising the right one.


**Other switches (even of other brands) may also be used, if they are comparable or better than the 2 Procurve listed above.**

I'd say my Budget would be no more than 350-400$ / switch (currently I may get the 1810G-24 for 230$ and the 2510G-24 for 460$). Not sure if (in my case) the additional management feature (or other features?) are worth the price difference though.

 

[SirDice]

Off-topic might be a better place as it doesn't have anything to do with FreeBSD directly.

 

[Uniballer]

I went through this about a year ago for my workplace. And I knew I had to bury a switch in a crawlspace that is dry, but a pain to access. And I needed POE (power over ethernet) for the phones I was going to deploy. I looked at everything on the market and for my needs the Cisco SGE2000P seemed to balance all the things that I needed, but they cost way too much. I found that by telling eBay to let me know whenever one came up for auction below $500 I was able to get 3 for less than $1000 US (the SGE2000P was previously a Linksys product, so I have a mix of Linksys and Cisco units, but they can all run the latest Cisco firmware).

Beware that link aggregation may not give you what you are probably thinking: faster throughput than 1Gbps on a single TCP or UDP connection. I know it won't with the Cisco switches.

At home, I have a mix of Netgear GS108 and GS116 (unmanaged) switches, also purchased on eBay. They work fine. I don't need VLANs at home, anyway.

 

[luckylinux]

I went through this about a year ago for my workplace. And I knew I had to bury a switch in a crawlspace that is dry, but a pain to access. And I needed POE (power over ethernet) for the phones I was going to deploy. I looked at everything on the market and for my needs the Cisco SGE2000P seemed to balance all the things that I needed, but they cost way too much. I found that by telling eBay to let me know whenever one came up for auction below $500 I was able to get 3 for less than $1000 US (the SGE2000P was previously a Linksys product, so I have a mix of Linksys and Cisco units, but they can all run the latest Cisco firmware).

Beware that link aggregation may not give you what you are probably thinking: faster throughput than 1Gbps on a single TCP or UDP connection. I know it won't with the Cisco switches.

At home, I have a mix of Netgear GS108 and GS116 (unmanaged) switches, also purchased on eBay. They work fine. I don't need VLANs at home, anyway.

Link aggregation wouldn't let me get more than 1gbps for one connection? That's exactly its purpose! While Wikipedia may not be the best source of all ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

Link aggregation is a computer networking term to describe various methods of combining (aggregating) multiple network connections in parallel to increase throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain, and to provide redundancy in case one of the links fails.

Then ... wait? What does Wikipedia mean with "Connection"?
Maybe it can't do that on a single TCP or UDP connection? Surely it can do that if there are two or more though (for instance: >=2 Samba instances, >=2 Apache instances, >=2 Mysql instances, etc).

About the Cisco unit I see some good points (expecially management via SSH and SNMP). However when I took a look at power consumption I got a shock: "No PoE supplied: 12V at 8.5A (102W)" vs the 22W of the newer 1810G-24 (v2). I agree that in winter it may be a good idea, however in summer that's too much :\

I don't know if you or anyone else can elaborate a bit more (expecially on "Link Aggregation" - which I also plan to use for redundancy).

 

[Uniballer]

Link aggregation wouldn't let me get more than 1gbps for one connection? That's exactly its purpose! While Wikipedia may not be the best source of all ...

Then ... wait? What does Wikipedia mean with "Connection"?
Maybe it can't do that on a single TCP or UDP connection? Surely it can do that if there are two or more though (for instance: >=2 Samba instances, >=2 Apache instances, >=2 Mysql instances, etc).

Read this. Not for exactly the same equipment, but this is Cisco's implementation concept. And it is easy to make low-level hardware/firmware that can do it very quickly. On a good mix of nodes I'll bet it is very effective, but you can see that it won't boost the speed of communication between a single pair of machines at all. I don't know exactly what other vendors are doing, but at least this shows that you need to ask or you will be disappointed.

About the Cisco unit I see some good points (expecially management via SSH and SNMP). However when I took a look at power consumption I got a shock: "No PoE supplied: 12V at 8.5A (102W)" vs the 22W of the newer 1810G-24 (v2). I agree that in winter it may be a good idea, however in summer that's too much :\

I would never run these at home. They are too big and hot and the fans are kinda noisy. But I needed the POE at work and they are well built and cheap enough on eBay if you are patient. I think I got much better quality gear buying the SGE2000P's used than I would have been able to get buying new gear given the $1000 switch budget.

 

[luckylinux]

Read this. Not for exactly the same equipment, but this is Cisco's implementation concept. And it is easy to make low-level hardware/firmware that can do it very quickly. On a good mix of nodes I'll bet it is very effective, but you can see that it won't boost the speed of communication between a single pair of machines at all. I don't know exactly what other vendors are doing, but at least this shows that you need to ask or you will be disappointed.

Thank you. I've had a look at it and in fact it's just like you said. However in multitasking operations (and for redundancy) >1gbps speed may be useful. Let alone for a virtualization server (1-2 card for each VM :e).

I would never run these at home. They are too big and hot and the fans are kinda noisy. But I needed the POE at work and they are well built and cheap enough on eBay if you are patient. I think I got much better quality gear buying the SGE2000P's used than I would have been able to get buying new gear given the $1000 switch budget.

There's eBay and eBay. If your seller gives you original products and there is no problem with support, then it may be a good option. However these switch produce too much heat IMHO :\ They're gonna empty the UPS battery in case of power outage.

I just found that HP reccomends the Procurve 1910-8G/16G/24G switches for SMB (http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Net...smart-switches-are-right-for-your/ba-p/111513) instead of - say - the 1810. However in the datasheet it's reported "Limited CLI support". Not sure what they mean. SNMP is supported though. It would be only $20 more than the 1810-24G (and have more RAM, more flash, PoE which I don't need **at the moment**). Power consumption seems to be higher though.

Furthermore - even though CLI seems to not be supported at 100% - it seems to be possible to manage multiple (up to 32x - no problems there :e) 1910 switches through one single web interface.


I already own one HP Procurve 1810-8G (v1) and one HP Procurve 1810-24G (v1). They both run fine. Wondering if I should change product line for ease of managing or if I'd be better with some newer 1810-24G (v2). The idea of having to configure every one by its dedicated web interface doesn't really appeal me. 2 switches may be still OK, but 4 switches (or more, in the future) may be too many. On the other hand, a centralized web-based management (like Procurve 1910's) interface may only be useful if it has been conceived properly.