New Cisco L3 switch

[coxhaus]

I think I am going to buy a new Cisco L3 switch. One of my ports is kind of funky. I guess the switch needs a reset, but I think I may buy a new Cisco CBS350-8P-E-2G-NA switch. I found them on sale for $278 from a Cisco partner. It seems like a good buy right now. It has no fans so it will be quiet. I have a Cisco SG350x-24 10 gig switch but it gets noisy in the summertime as it has fans. I don't really need the 10 gig now as my internet is still slow.
I don't have a need for nbase-t as none of my clients have nbase-t speeds. And to buy nbase-t adds a lot to the price.
I do need POE+ power for my 3 Cisco 150ax wireless APs.
I assume the Cisco CBS switches will be as good or better than the SG switches which I have owned.

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[ddaenen1]

I do need POE+ power for my 3 Cisco 150ax wireless APs.

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So what is the verdict on the 150AX after a while in use? How would you compare them to the WAP571?

 

[RobJack]

I do need POE+ power for my 3 Cisco 150ax wireless APs.
I assume the Cisco CBS switches will be as good or better than the SG switches which I have owned.

Just curious - which router are you using in your network?

 

[coxhaus]

Just curious - which router are you using in your network?

I am using a Dell PC with pfsense using my L3 switch. I could not find a Cisco solution since they did away with the Cisco RV340 router. I tried to buy a Cisco baby Firepower firewall but Cisco will not sell me support for home use. I can buy the firewall but I can't get software updates, only for 90 days.
I was Cisco trained on the old Cisco PIX firewalls, so I have idea of how they work. I can see Cisco not wanting to deal with a bunch of homeowners buying a complicated firewall that they have no idea of how it works.

So what is the verdict on the 150AX after a while in use? How would you compare them to the WAP571?

I like the 150ax wireless APs as I have 9 ax clients. I don't have nbase-t clients as most of my new hardware clients are wireless which have ax support. What I like about the Cisco 150ax wireless APs is that they are cheap, and you can install a lot of them in all the heavily used rooms. I have an old house with walls that degrade the signals so having an AP in every room works much better for me.

My old Cisco WAP581 APs were better in that they were 4 x 4 units and would reach out farther, but the signal degrades going through walls so the signal is not as good overall as having more AP units. I also think the roaming could be better in the AX spec as it is not as good as the older units. But speed prevails. I do have an iRobot which vacuums my house 3 days a week and it has no problems with my wireless network.
If my granddaughter stays for the whole summer, then I will probably add another AP in her room. The Cisco 150ax are snappier using Windows 11 than using my older Cisco WAP581 APs and part of it is maybe having real close proximity with only air space between you and the AP. I have installed an AP in every room that we spend much time in. My wife's sewing room is in progress as she spends lots of time there doing projects. She also has an easy chair where she zooms a lot with her friends about their projects.

I have my 85-inch 4K TV using an AppleTV 4K on wireless. And it works great. I had a wire running there in the past but I have pulled it because the wire needs to cross a fireplace to reach the TV. I see no issues with TV on wireless. All my wireless APs run on different channels, so they do not wait on each other. The only issue I have had using the Cisco 150ax wireless APs is that they are slow to come back when you lose power. I have solved that by buying an APC Smart1000 battery backup which backs up the Cisco POE+ switch that keeps the APs hot when power drops.

My old Cisco WAP581 APs were $300 apiece. The new Cisco 150ax APs are $102. You can buy a lot of 150ax APs for what the old one's cost.
The old Cisco WAP581 APs pulls around 25 to 26 watts each. The Cisco 150ax APs pull around 11 watts so I run more for the same power draw. To run a lot of older WAP581 units I need a larger power POE+ switch.

My wireless now is the fastest it has ever been. But I am chasing 5 GHz. This is my thinking right now. I may have left out stuff as I am getting older, but this is what comes to mind as I write this.

 

[coxhaus]

I guess I left out that the Cisco WAP581 wireless APs have a 2.5 gig port as well as a 1 gig port so if that is your thing it might be a better fit.

 

[tgl]

Returning to the original thread topic: I recently bought a Cisco CBS350-8MGP-2X switch on the strength of positive recommendations hereabouts for the CBS350 series. That model has the right number of fast ports for my needs, PoE+ on most ports, no fan, and it's VLAN-capable which was one of my few feature needs. (So yeah, it's overkill for me, but I wanted to see what sort of pond the big boys splash in.) It usually goes for $770 - $810 on Amazon, but I was able to score one for $720 during Prime Day.

I like it generally: it's solid kit and the firmware seems well written. I do have one big gripe, which is that the boot-up time is just awful: ~ 3min from power applied to passing data. I have a UPS under it, but nonetheless I'm going to have to put in some software hacks to keep my attached servers from going nuts if they boot up and see NO CARRIER on their network ports. How can a simple switch take that long to get rolling?

 

[coxhaus]

I do have one big gripe, which is that the boot-up time is just awful: ~ 3min from power applied to passing data. I have a UPS under it, but nonetheless I'm going to have to put in some software hacks to keep my attached servers from going nuts if they boot up and see NO CARRIER on their network ports. How can a simple switch take that long to get rolling?

Your infrastructure like switches should never have to be rebooted if you have servers that can't be down.
The first thing is a UPS which you have and if that is not enough then you need redundancy, so nothing is down. Buy another switch and setup redundancy so you only have to take 1 switch down at a time. IT does not matter whether a switch takes 1 minute or 5 that is way too long for a server.

I am not sure why you have to take the switch down as there are very few software updates. Cisco allows you to schedule your reboots for things like software updates. You apply the software udate and wait for a good time to reboot. Schedule them with server reboots. If you can't figure out a way to do that then redundancy is the way to go.

 

[tgl]

Your infrastructure like switches should never have to be rebooted if you have servers that can't be down.
The first thing is a UPS which you have and if that is not enough then you need redundancy, so nothing is down.

The scenario that I'm concerned about is a power outage that's long enough to exhaust whatever UPSes I've got. While that's rare where I live, it's certainly not unheard-of. In that case, when power comes back the servers will boot faster than the switch, and I don't want to have to intervene manually to get to a working state. The case is rare enough that I'm not going to spend money on either multiple Cisco switches or generators, so I want a software fix.

 

[coxhaus]

The scenario that I'm concerned about is a power outage that's long enough to exhaust whatever UPSes I've got. While that's rare where I live, it's certainly not unheard-of. In that case, when power comes back the servers will boot faster than the switch, and I don't want to have to intervene manually to get to a working state. The case is rare enough that I'm not going to spend money on either multiple Cisco switches or generators, so I want a software fix.

Well, if everything is down the servers are not communicating anyway, so I do not see that as a problem with the switch taking a couple of more minutes. Everything is already down and has been down for a while.

I do have 5 hours of runtime on my APC for my infrastructure. I don't want issues.
Maybe you need longer runtime on your UPS for your infrastructure which should not be hard to do. Servers should be a separate UPS because there is almost no way to keep a lot of servers running a long time. You pretty much want to shut them down when the power goes out. APC has software to shutdown servers when the power goes out. I don't know about other UPS devices as I have only used APC for 30 years.

This reminds I need to add the APC module to my pfsense router for power outages. At least add it to my list of to do things.

PS
I have been thinking about this today and you may be able to share a UPS. So, in my case I have a Windows 11 PC for my NAS that runs sometimes that will be plugged into my LAN and my APC. My APC is plugged into my LAN setup on my iPhone so I can see all the info and I can change things outside of my network as it is setup on an APC web page somewhere. I want my Windows 11 NAS to shutdown if it is running so I guess I need to run APC parachute. My NAS should be able to talk to my APC across the LAN and shutdown right away. That leaves my infrastructure running until I want to shut it down. I think this will work but I have not tried it. Can pfsense do the same thing? I don't know. I need a little more research.