
At a glance | |
Product | Ubiquiti Edgeswitch 8 150W (ES‑8‑150W) [Website] |
Summary | 8 port PoE+ managed switch with SFP ports |
Pros | • Layer 3 features • 150W PoE+ supported on all RJ45 ports |
Cons | • Configuration learning curve • 1 Gb SFP instead of 10 Gb SFP+ • Need to use CLI for some common features |
Typical Price: $330 Buy From Amazon |
Introduction
I recently reviewed Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter Lite, making this review of the EdgeSwitch 8 very timely. As the EdgeRouter Lite has only 3 ports, it is useful to pair it with a switch for more network ports. So why not pair it with one of Ubiquiti's EdgeSwitches?
Ubiquiti lists five switch models in their EdgeMax product line. EdgeMax switches have anywhere from 8-48 RJ45 ports, plus 2-12 SFP (fiber) ports. All EdgeSwitches are Gigabit switches, with the exception of the EdgeSwitch 16XG, which is a 10 Gigabit switch. The EdgeMax EdgeSwitch 8-150W and EdgeSwitches (24-48 ports) support 802.3af PoE (Power over Ethernet) and 802.3at PoE+. This review will cover the ES-8-150W EdgeSwitch 8 150W.
The EdgeSwitch 8-150W is a desktop or wall-mountable (brackets included), but not rack-mountable switch with eight RJ45 ports and two SFP Gigabit Ethernet ports. It is passively cooled, runs silently and can be powered with the included AC cable (no adapter/power wart) or via an optional 54 VDC power connection. It is enclosed in a black metal case measuring 8.03"x1.69"x9.25."
EdgeSwitch 8-150W Front
The Ethernet ports and LEDs are on the front of the switch and the power ports are on the rear, shown in the images above and below
EdgeSwitch 8-150W Rear
Inside
Inside the metal case is the main board and power supply. As you can see below, the brains of the operation are covered by a large heat sink providing enough passive cooling to eliminate the need for a fan.
Main Board
I was unable to remove the heatsink without risking damage, so wasn't able to identify the switching engine. But a little searching turned up a Reddit post about the 16 port ES-16-150W, which says it uses Broadcom's StrataConnect BCM53344 SoC 24-Port WebSmart GbE switch SoC and that the ES-8-150W is "otherwise identical" except for the number of ports.
Features
Some desktop switches disable an RJ45 port for each SFP port in use. On the EdgeSwitch 8-150W all RJ45 and SFP ports can be used simultaneously. That's the good news. The bad is that the ports aren't SFP+ to support 10 Gbps link rates.
The EdgeSwitch 8-150W is rated with a total non-blocking throughput of 10 Gbps, and a total switching capacity of 20 Gbps, supporting up to 8000 MAC address in its switching table. The EdgeSwitch 8-150W supports 802.3af/at PoE+ and 24V passive PoE on all 8 RJ45 ports. The ports must be manually switched between PoE+ and 24V modes. Total PoE power available is 150 W, but per port power is limited to 34.2 W for 802.3at PoE+ devices and 17 W for 802.3af PoE.
A complete feature listing for the EdgeSwitch 8-150W is available on Ubiquiti's product page. Below is a high level summary of the EdgeSwitch 8-150W's key features.
- (8) RJ45 and (2) SFP Gigabit Ethernet ports
- 10Gbps throughput, 20Gbps switching capacity
- 150W 802.3at/af and 24V passive PoE
- 802.1AB (LLDP)
- 802.1D/S/W (STP/RSTP/MSTP)
- 802.1Q VLANS (up to 4093), Private VLANs, Voice VLAN, MAC-based VLANs
- Port mirroring
- Security: MAC, 802.1X, Radius, TACACS+
- 802.3ad (up to 6 LAGs)
- DHCP servers (up to 128 DHCP pools, 2048 maximum leases)
- Static and Connected Routing
- Layer 2 and Layer 3 ACLs for traffic control
- QoS: Auto VoIP Vlan, CoS-DSCP mapping and policy controls, bandwidth allocation by port and queue, 7 configurable queues
The EdgeSwitch 8-150W can be configured via a Command Line Interface (CLI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI.) The EdgeSwitch 8-150W CLI can be accessed via the console port, and more conveniently via Telnet (default) as well as SSH v1.5 and v2.0. Interestingly, I found the EdgeSwitch's CLI very similar to Cisco's CLI, whereas I found the EdgeRouter CLI very similar to Juniper's CLI. Similar to a Cisco switch, you need to save your configurations on the EdgeSwitch 8-150W after you apply them or they'll be lost when you reboot the switch.