Source
r/networking•
cr0ft

Netgear ProSafe XS 10Gb - cheap, but are they cheerful?

Anyone have any experience with Netgears 10 gig switches? I'm going to need 10 or so ports worth and the budget is not lavish, which led me to these. I mean... how bad can they be, really? I'm a HP fan usually but I'm not aware of anything they have for remotely those prices. You get what you pay for, sure, but surely the Netgears would, you know... switch some simple jumbo frame traffic without shenanigans?

Posted Sep 25, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

027
nabeel_co•

I'd never buy anything netgear ever again.

They use deceptive labeling and marketing on their products to make them look like they do more than they actually do.

Been caught once, never again.

I bought a "PoE plus" managed switch from them online once, thinking the spelling of "plus" as opposed to "+" was just because of character set limitation.

It wasn't. The switch was neither 802.3af or 802.3at compliant, and was labelled on the box "PoE plus", instead of what I expected to see which was PoE+.

9
vppencilsharpening•

Did the spec sheet list 802.3af or 802.3at? I usually get my information from there instead of the model name.

5
nabeel_co•

I was buying it on Amazon for myself. Everywhere in the listing it kept saying it was a "PoE plus" switch and how it provides more power than normal PoE, "up to 25 watts"

Turns out, the whole switch was 25 watts, and it provided something like 7 watts per port, except their "plus ports" that offered 12w neither of which meet PoE, or PoE+.

In hindsight, I shouldn't of taken it at face value, and should've taken note of all the weasel words.

But, what kind of reputable company, that has pretty decent brand recognition, does such dodgy garbage bullshit marketing like that?

Turns out, Netgear does. And that's why I'll never buy another one of their products.

Edit: I should add, I solve this problem by returning the ShitGear switch, then searching eBay for a Juniper EX4200-48PX (48 ports of PoE+ with both 900w PSUs populated) with a corrupted OS, and bought it in a "not working/As is" state, re-flashed it's master and backup firmware, and started using it at home, with no issues, for about 190 bucks, shipped.

It was so cheap, I bought a second one just because I could.

2
cr0ftOP•

Yeah, I always associate Netgear with consumer level stuff. Which is why I'm hesitating here.

Not sure what else is out there in the affordable 10 gig managed switches segment. Zyxel has a 12-port variant, the 1920-something or other, but that's twice the price, and Ubiquiti, but I don't really feel any warmer or fuzzier about Ubuiqiti switches than I do Netgear. Thanks.

2
Jrmental•

We ran zyxel for years before upgrading to meraki

2
nabeel_co•

It depends on what your risk tolerance is.

I scoured eBay (not even really all that hard) and found a Juniper EX4200-PX with both 900w power supplies populated, that had a corrupted OS listed as "as is/not working", and in the description the seller said all they did to test it was turn it on, where they noticed that it only boots to the backup OS.

Turns out, probably due to a power failure, the OS had become corrupted (which is an uncommon but kinda a unique thing to Juniper), which is why it was booting to the backup OS.

A simple command, and I was able to restore the primary partition and get it up and running like new.

Been in service for almost two years now with no issues.

With Juniper, whenever you do an OS upgrade, once everything is good, you are supposed to mirror the boot partition to the backup partition. The configs get automatically synced across, but the OS doesn't until you explicitly say so.

Someone had done a firmware upgrade, without updating the backup partition once everything was settled, so at some point, the switch had a power loss during some sort of important OS level write operation, and corrupted it's primary OS, so it booted from the backup, which gives you a scary warning, but, additionally, the backup was an older version, which also gave them a second scary warning.

All they needed to do was set the current partition as the primary, and copy the now new primary partition, to the old, corrupted primary one, making it the backup partition, while fixing the corruption.

But instead, likely because of a lack of experience, they decided to scrap it after that.

This seems to be fairly common with Juniper gear, especially now that the EX4200s are slowly being discontinued.

Edit: My Point in the above is depending on how many 10GbE ports you need, you can get the 4x SFP+ card for the 4200, and an SFP+ 10GbE module or two, to get your 10GbE

1
jftitan•

Yeah, that happened to a client of mine. They ordered a Netgear with Plus versus the "+", and they discovered this mistake when it was too late. One of those, they ordered their equipment. whomever did the ordering was trying to save a buck, in doing so, did not realize they saved a buck, but at the cost of exactly what you mentioned. Lack of the actual certification for at/af. This was a pissing problem because it was equipment ordered over 5 months prior to the install. so when it came time to install it. ...We were delayed by weeks because of a bean counter trying to save a buck, and it costs us twice what we wanted, due to short notice ordering.

Sometimes, that marketing pamphlet from Netgear is shit all over. (other than that, I've had a few GS725 with PoE, and they are work horses. They just work, and as long as the environment doesn't change temps, we ended up retiring working equipment.

1
vppencilsharpening•

Long story short we had an XSM7224S and then added a 2nd with the new model number M7300-24XF (Same hardware/firmware) to add some redundancy.

They worked well, but did not really have great vendor support. Configuring link aggregation was a little bit of a crap shoot, but overall they were stable and did the job for longer than I had expected them to.

At refresh time came, we had grown significantly as a company and had much different requirements (and a much better budget) so we went with a pair of Arista 7150-24 switches. There was a measurable decrease in storage latency with the Arista switches (a use case the Netgear switches were NOT selected for, but were required to "grow" into).

Overall I think the Netgear switches worked well for the ~5 years we used them. They are very hard to beat on price and for the most part just worked.

If asked again I would be hard pressed to pick between Netgear and Ubiquiti equipment. I really like Ubiquiti for low cost, low expectation, installations, but I feel like Netgear may have better reliability/stability here.

​

Take this with a grain of salt because I am a generalist, not a network guy. Also the HPE equipment really grew on me after the Aruba acquisition.

​

TL;DR; Don't knock it until you have had to use it.

4
cr0ftOP•

Yeah, I like HP. The Procurve stuff is what I've used most and it's all just solid. I'd take it over Cisco, personally. Thanks for the input. I agree about Ubiquiti as well, I'd use that for long range wifi stuff but I'm not nearly as sanguine about their switches.

3
vppencilsharpening•

I really like what Aruba has added and the direction things seem to be going.

The two Netgear models I listed had, at the time, a CLI interface that I was able to use to do some configurations. If you are deploying multiple units, this is going to be important. I remember it being fairly decent, but different than what I have used since and less than ideal documentation.

1
sunshine_killer•

ruckus icx has a poe 12 port I think it can do 10 gb...on mobile else i would look it up, price point, maybe around 400 to 600. its been two years since i bought one.

2
BlowmewhileiplaycodNetwork/sysadmin Intern•

We're using one for testing right now, aside from the crappy gui it's alright and does the job

2
noukthx•

Listing some requirements or use case is important for context.

I'd be looking at the second hand market before going Netgear, plenty of good 10G stuff in the second hand market now.

2
cr0ftOP•

iSCSI multipathing setup for storage to some ESXi nodes. They don't even have to communicate outside themselves, just move data from one port to the other, quickly. A small vSphere cluster. In reality I don't even think 10 gig is needed, but we're swapping out the storage and now all our units in that setup will have 10 gig ports so it seems silly to keep a 1 gig bottleneck switch in the system.

1
noukthx•

Plenty of Aristas on ebay for a few hundred bucks. Be a much better investment imo.

2
JM-Gurgeh•

I once came across Netgear switches that support VLANs... but not trunking. That's how bad it can be.

I found out the hard way.

2
JM-Gurgeh•

If you're looking for cheap 10G switches, there's better options. Cisco SMB has a few models. Juniper is expensive (compared to SMB stuff) but you might be able to get sizable discounts.

Depending on your use case, you might be able to get away with multigig switches. Those are expensive as well, so you should try and get good discounts. I know Juniper has a EX2300 model with some multigig ports, so it all depends on how many 10G and 1G you need. Other vendors probably have offerings as well.

2
Boomam•

I've used the older XS 10g models in the past.
They do the job, no WebGui, all some dodgy, most features missing AdobeAir app, but for basic netwokring and 10g, they do the job.

1
pants6000taking a tcpdump•

This isn't necessarily a recommendation but https://mikrotik.com/product/crs312_4c_8xg_rm

1
cr0ftOP•

Thanks! Great price and you can even do layer 3 stuff with it with the right OS choice. For our application we don't really need that, but still a really affordable way to get 10 gig and some L3.

1
pants6000taking a tcpdump•

Don't use it for layer 3 if you can avoid it; layer 2 stuff is done on the switch chips but L3 gets punted to the CPU and throughput via that path will be quite limited.

7
cr0ftOP•

Good to know, and yeah if I needed L3 I'd probably squeeze more money out of the budget somehow and keep going HP. But again, good info.

1
bmoraca•

You can buy Arista on the grey market for pretty cheap. Probably a better idea, depending on what you actually need to do with these.

1
cr0ftOP•

Hm, seems like HP has a model that (if I bought two) would suffice. Not a big fan of the Officeconnect lineup either, but... maybe over Netgear; HPE OfficeConnect 1850 6XGT and 2XGT/SPF+ ... decisions, decisions. I do like the lifetime warranty promise. And this is already a HP shop.

1
Apachez•

Do you need any SFP+ or just RJ45 interfaces x 10 at 10Gbps?

1
cr0ftOP•

The latter, just copper and CAT6.

1
Apachez•

One option is to use something like:

S5800-8TF12S 12-Port 10Gb SFP+ L2/L3 Switch with 8 Gigabit RJ45/SFP Combo Ports, $1900

https://www.fs.com/products/69404.html

or

S5900-24S4T2Q 24-Port 10Gb SFP+ L2/L3 Data Center TOR Switch with 4 Gigabit RJ45 and 2 40Gb QSFP+ Uplinks, $2500

https://www.fs.com/products/73467.html

(the later is using a broadcom chipset)

and add RJ45 SFP+ when needed:

30 meter edition:

Customized 10GBASE-T SFP+ Copper RJ-45 30m Transceiver Module, $59

https://www.fs.com/products/66617.html

or

80 meter edition:

Customized 10GBASE-T SFP+ Copper RJ-45 80m Transceiver Module, $76

https://www.fs.com/products/87603.html

Or if you will ONLY use RJ45 10G then there is this puppy (then you dont need to add the RJ45 10G SFP+ since those are already builtin):

S5850-48T4Q 48-Port 10GBase-T L2/L3 Data Center ToR/Leaf Switch with 4 40Gb QSFP+ Uplinks, $3800

https://www.fs.com/products/69378.html

I dunno if the above exists in a 24 int edition, I think it should but couldnt find it on their site.

Another variant is to pick a regular 1Gbps switch who then got 4x10G SFP+ because then you get away with $279 (and then just add the cost of those RJ45 SFP+ when needed), downside is that this "trick" only works for the case of max 4x10G interfaces:

S3900-24T4S Fanless 24-Port 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Stackable Managed Switch with 4 10Gb SFP+ Uplinks, $279

https://www.fs.com/products/72944.html

The thing with 10G RJ45 equipment is that I and many others prefer fiber once you reach the need of 10G links so that might explain why there still are not that many options when it comes to 10G RJ45 switches (and when you rarely do need a 10G RJ45 you solve that with one of those 30M or 80M SFP+ RJ45 10G modules).

1