Hey! I have a small homelab with 4 servers and I’m looking for an inexpensive 10 gigabit switch. Right now I have a Mikrotik RB5009 router that also does all the switching. I want to use the SFP+ cage to connect it to a switch. I was thinking about a HP 2910al-24G but they’re way too power hungry. I want at least 4 SFP+ and 8 copper ports, since I’d like to avoid using SFP to copper adapters. My budget is about $500 USD. Any advice?
Honestly for my home lab, I’ve gone down the mikrotik path with a CRS309-1G-8S+IN as my core, CRS326-24G-2S+RM for my edge and a couple of unmanaged 2.5gb switches with 10gb uplinks. I would warn against mikrotik if you are looking at layer 3 routing on switch though.
The reason I say this is because of experience. They don’t have enough compute power for the layer3 to really work well at high data rates. Fine for hosting external web services etc but if you’re looking for layer3 with performance in mind they aren’t a good option.
Map out what your plan is from a network architecture perspective and understand if you want onswitch layer3 routing to occur or if you want to offload this to your firewall.
After I realised the layer3 performance was a bit lousy, I re-designed my network with a virtual sophos firewall that has 10g down and uplinks plus a couple 1gb links and threw a lot of resources at that the vm for it to perform my layer3 routing duties throughout my home lab.
It’s also a better design(having your firewall do your routing) from a control and inspection perspective due to the firewall being inexpensive and giving quite a lot of flexibility with regard to traffic overview.