I am starting over and building out a kind of Christmas list here. I was thinking of moving to Ubiquity, but now I’m leaning toward Omada. This is for home use where I mostly want better support for VLANs as I do a lot of IoT/Home Assistant stuff.
Is Omada a good way to go?
You’ll be happy with either I think. I run Omada and it’s great for my home use. It was also less expensive and didn’t have supply chain issues when I was searching. Today, I’m not sure but I have seen many complaining anymore that UniFi just isn’t available. So I’m guessing they fixed that problem.
That’s great - thanks. Do you know if I need a switch? Can I do things with an unmanaged third party switch? It seems like their switch has really loud fans.
I know a basic ‘dumb’ switch can’t handle VLAN tags being passed through it, but something like the TP-Link ‘smart’ unmanaged switch (TL-SG108E) might allow it. It’s fanless and supports VLANs at least by physical separation and 802.1Q support.
According to ChatGPT:
Yes, the TP-Link TL-SG108E is a managed switch, and it supports VLAN functionality. This means that it can handle VLAN tagging and pass VLAN-tagged frames through its ports.
If you have an access point or any other device upstream that is tagging its frames with VLAN information, and you connect it to one of the ports on the TP-Link TL-SG108E, the switch should be able to pass those VLAN-tagged frames through to other devices on the network, provided that the other devices and the switch are properly configured to handle VLANs.
Keep in mind that for VLANs to work correctly, all the devices involved, including the switch and the devices connected to it, must be configured consistently with regard to VLAN settings. If you need to segregate network traffic using VLANs, you’ll need to configure the TP-Link TL-SG108E accordingly, specifying which ports are members of which VLANs. Additionally, the connected devices, such as the access point, should be configured to tag their frames with the appropriate VLAN identifiers.
All this said. I’d recommend a switch that can VLAN and POE. I’m never buying anything non-POE again.
FWIW I have a TP-Link managed switch (TL-SG2428P) and I’m very pleased with it. I also have Unifi APs and everything works well together. Unlike the Unifi gear the switch doesn’t have to run with the controller, not sure if the same is true for their APs.
The switch is pretty much silent.