Agree about the differences in the 225 and 245, i was actually trying to hold off and see what Wi-Fi 6 units came out as i dont plan on changing them for a while, however the 245s in my case wont give me much benefit as most devices that connect to the APs are only 2x2 MIMO or less and in most cases also only 2.4GHz. I think i have 2 devices that benefit from more - IoT everywhere. I am overall happy with my 225s, 245s and my new SG2428P, but they are not without issues and as the enterprise is their target audience, there are things that need ironing out, including in the new Omada SDN. Don't get me wrong they are very stable devices but what product doesn't come fault-free.

@Rod-IT 

 

I dont think it is enterprise, That is just the label. It is for Small business use case or for advanced home use. Price point tells us that. Enterprise gear will be 5 to 10 times more.

 

Wi-Fi 6 / 802.11ax is more for density than speed. You may see in home use case, 20% improvement, not more. Dont go with marketing. EAP245 is a good investment for next 3 to 5 years.

 

Consider 1Gig fiber service at homes, that really is ultimately shared by up to 512 other customers to then uplink to a common 5Gbps to 10Gbps circuit that connects into a CO core. Compare that with a commercial dedicated business grade 1Gig service that costs you 10 to 15 times more.

 

Since home 1Gig services are shared, you only use that when you do a speed test. If you will measure your average use of a typical 1Gig home subscriber, you may find that it will be like 10Mbps only (you need to use something like cacti / MRTG/ Zabbix to test yourself, dont go with anyone telling you or you read about). So if today, your average speed needs are 10Mbps, in 5 years, even if they grow to 100Mbps, EAP245 will still deliver it.

 

I have very good experience in University Campus and dorms environment and if a 500 student dorm at peak night time before pandemic hit, was only using 400Mbps total, each student allowed to use up to 100Mbps speeds, and no one complaining, what does that tell you? of course the dedicated bandwidth 1Gbps circuit used are like 100 lane higway compared to 2 lane highway (for home 1Gig service highway).

I think i am perhaps not clear in some of my replies as i could be. Yes, the 245 is good and will do me fine - speed was never my requirement, it's multiple devices, hence the IoT mention, these often don't use 5Ghz and don't need bandwidth, just a connection. Smart-devices are growing so being able to have multiple clients is more beneficial than the speed they'll use. Wi-Fi6 was purely a thought, in all honesty the 225 would still be viable for me in multiple years, Wi-Fi6 would likely be the last device i buy for at least a decade, but price wasn't in my budget for what it offered me, especially given the above. So I skipped it. The majority of my devices are hardwired, hence the new switch, but that's giving me a little grief (or the Omada SDN is), I'm still playing trying to figure out what's going on. I have a 360/36MBit connection to the internet and no complaints there, Gig is available to me, but as a residential consumer i am struggling to see the need for that too - unless i get it as an offer or in a deal, otherwise it's not on my radar just yet. Most of what i do is home-lab and self-taught everything, so it never hurts to tinker with new toys

@Rod-IT , I understand and I also was not aware that second port on the EAP245 was a simple bridged one. I assumed just like you did. Then I realized that Tplink is just following Unifi products and trying to fill the exact same need at simply better pricing. In the process, some of developers and engineer at Tplink have implemented exact same specs and almost similar designs.

 

EAP245 should not be an issue with 100 devices even. But I agree, all your needs could have been met with 225. I myself have not tested if performance of 2.4 band is magically better in Wi-Fi 6. But even in the interfered environment today, with 10 of my own home devices (like printer, smartwatches, couple of older phones that only support 2.4Ghz and two older desktops with a card that is 2.4GHz), I have not seen any issues even with High def streaming). So I have not thought of trying Wi-Fi 6 so far. I only have two clients / a phone and a laptop  that could benefot from using Wi-Fi 6, but never felt I needed any improvement for these devices.

 

Anyway, let us hope sometime early next year, Tplink will have another upgrade that will help make use of  secondary port to a programmble VLAN. For your home use case, you can still use it as you may not need to put it into a different vlan than the AP vlan itself. The Wifi networks though can be put into any VLAns that you need and you can add isolation by simple things like Guest network feature and at more granular level by leveraging EAP ACL feature.

 

I have 2428P that I am now testing for LAG (server teaming / bundling and for resilient uplinks) as well as use with copper SFPs to make use of couple of unused SFP ports. Good luck learning. Feel free to post any questions. We are fortunate to have a very helpful soul here @R1D2 who will generally chime in regularly to share his knowledge and experirnce.

Yes, R1D2 has been helpful in other replies i have read but not posted on. If anyone could suggest anything on why my switch is unable to see the IPs or device names of the ESXi guests, that would be handy or why the switch consistently doesn't show it's transferred data until a refresh. I expect software glitch or FW glitch, but I hope these can be fixed.

@Rod-IT 

 

I believe they have just added support for the switch and the gateway (routers) and many things I have seen not work or show as they show for APs. So these are the bugs and they will take couple of revisions to get resolved. remember SDN controller 4.1.5 is the first release for any switch or router. Previous ones only supported APs.

I agree, but the switch would have been tested in-house and with the SDN, since that's it's unique selling point.

 

Basics like being able to see the traffic shouldn't be a glitch, being able to see devices connected to multiple ports or on VM hosts should be fairly simple too and while i can see them, the switch reports they are disconnecting - when they are not, i can't see traffic totals for VMs, i can't see their device names or IPs.

 

I accept this is the first release of the switch and the SDN controller, but these are basic things, my setup is not an unusual one, but i am happy to help, provide logs, show screenshots etc in order to help make this better.

 

I wouldn't be so quick to adopt new technologies if i couldn't put up with a glitch here and there.

 

@Fae 

If you need anything specific from me, from the switch, the controller (Debian based VM) the APs or additional screenshots or need me to run specific commands to assist you with understanding what is happening - please, feel free to ask, i am more than happy to work with you and the team to solve any bugs and figure out what is going on in my situation.

 

None of the above are impacting me or my network directly, so nothing is urgent either. I want to make that clear, i am by no means complaining.

Thanks for your reply @R1D2 

 

This isnt a VMware / ESXi issue, the VMs themselves do not physically disconnect, the switch claims they disconnect - but of course they are not directly connected to the switch, but virtual NICs connected to physical NICs.

 

I am not facing an issue here, i want to be clear about that, if this was a VMware issue i'd be right on it.

 

I can have a ping run all day against any of the VMs, the host or the gateway and it does not drop

 

Any device hardwired to the switch show stable conenctions and uptime according to the device, it's hostname and IP where available, but the VMs only show a MAC address, so i've manually added hostnames to some of them, i never see an IP and the host name is never resolved, but the switch will show them disconnecting and reconnecting - like a client roaming between APs.

 

To be fair, this could have also been the behaviour with the old switch but i had no visual of this and it was one reason i wanted an SDN compatible switch - everything is (or should be) visible in one place.

 

I have a feeling its related to the physical NICs of the ESXi host sending multiple mac addresses to the switch that is causing this, simillarly to how NLB would work and I've known in work the network guy has had to do something at the switch end, i believe to do with multicast mac addressing - i'm purely guessing here, but could this be it?

 

Any VM could pass any NIC and will likely use whichever is least in use, this is why i am wondering about multicast/unicast and multiple macs.

 

Is there any further logs that might help diagnose?

 

Given that nothing actually disconnects or goes offline, i believe this is more software/configuration related than hardware or the VMs themselves.

 

Obviously this is not a show stopper, but it does make me wonder.