Since I started working for a VMware partner in March, I have slowly been building my home VMware lab. My most recent addition has been a new layer 3 switch. I needed layer 3 switching so I could setup VMware NSX in my home lab with multiple VLANs and fully test micro-segmentation. I made a quick list of requirements for what I was looking for in a switch before I went hunting.
My Requirements
- Silence - (Fan-less design)
- Low power consumption - (This switch is rated to draw 110V=19.8W)
- Enough ports to operate 3 or 4 hosts with 4 - 1GB NICs each and my Synology NAS 415+.
- Support for VLANS
- Support for LACP/LAG
- Layer 3 routing
- Low cost
After doing some research online, I decided on the Cisco SG300-28. It gave me the most ports possible and still remaining fan-less and meeting all of my other requirements. The price was right too, I caught a sale online and was able to purchase it for $318. That comes out to $11.35 per port. Not bad for all these features.
The switch has a CLI interface that is very similar to a Cisco Catalyst switch. It also comes with a nice GUI web interface for configuring it as well. So it keeps all admins happy.
One big gotcha that I ran into right away is that by default layer 3 mode is disabled. Below is the setting in the web interface to enable layer 3.
After getting the switch setup in layer 2 mode I went to enable layer 3 and this neat little warning comes up. As Lenny Pepperbottom would say How neat is that?
So, after configuring all of my settings enabling layer 3, this switch deletes your config and starts over from scratch. Great switch, but that's rather annoying. But it gave me extra practice on setting the switch up again.
Next time I'll talk about how I enabled Link aggregation on my ESXi hosts and also enabled LACP on my Synology NAS array.
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