REVIEW Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch ES-48-500

The Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch series (ES-48-500W)

Basics:

The Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch series is a collection of switching hardware from Ubiquiti. Who are Ubiquiti? Ubiquiti Networks started as a hardware manufacturer in 2005, releasing OEM intentioned mini-PCI wireless cards. After 2 years, Ubiquiti started in on their own wireless access points, in a variety of colours (not really) and flavours (basically 802.11 standards). In 2012 Ubiquiti started to release other networking products including PoE cameras, managed switches and network edge routers.

After the years of evolution, we’re now at the point where Ubiquiti have recently released a full-sized managed switch. In actuality, they’ve released 2 separate ranges of switch, which I’ll go into later. For now, let us concentrate on the hardware in front of us.

The Box:


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Lol, that’s just its box. And it’s a pretty simple box too. No addons, no extra guff. Clean, but detailed, etc, etc. It’s just a box. Who cares?

These are all good points. The box of the EdgeSwitch is pretty bare. No garish video-card style renderings, no crazy claims, no missing information, and a quick preview of things to come.

The Outside:


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Hmm, now we have some hardware. 48 ports of delicious PoE Gigabit, 2 x 1GBit SFPs and 2 x 10GBit SFPs. Limited extras, no bonuses, no sales pitch, no random crap, a power cable. That’s pretty awesome. Notice how there isn’t a light for activity. I personally think this is a good thing. Activity lights don’t really add anything for a switch. Sure, it’s nice to see them blink, and it can be a mediocre troubleshooting step, but it becomes quite useless if the switch itself shows you the status of each port. Admittedly, I much prefer the HP way of allowing you to choose what the lights do, but I do like that they’ve provided details on which ports are PoE. Except that they have that stupid passive PoE thing, so there are three status colours for the PoE.

Passive PoE – This is a non-standard created by Ubiquiti that allows Ubiquiti to power wireless devices created by Ubiquiti from a less powerful source than standard PoE. Passive PoE also uses a different pinout to standard PoE. It has not seen widespread adoption.

For people who believe this is an issue, not only do Ubiquiti supply a passive PoE injector with all devices that require it, they also have a professional range of products that will take standard PoE.

Of another note is that the rack ears are not removable. The EdgeSwitch is almost a single piece, with it separating into two pieces after removing the plethora of screws on the back. The switch itself is shorter than you’d expect, but is actually extraordinarily heavy. I didn’t weigh it as my only bathroom scales won’t work if you aren’t alive.

The Inside:


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Internal hardware is quite clean and very well organised. Nothing special to talk about here. Nothing really stand-out either. It’s clean, it works well, there aren’t any really stand-out problems, and it’s clean. When you turn it on, it can get to ear-piercing heights, but it’s generally as quiet or as loud as a normal switch of this type (think Dell N2000, HP 1900 series).

The Web Interface:


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The web interface is actually exactly what it says on the box. It’s relatively intuitive, it’s clean, it doesn’t overload you with information. It can quite easily provide all the details and information you could ever want. It’s really good. As you can see in the pictures above, even the help menu is useful, explaining each setting, what the expected outcome is and how it all works together. I don’t really know what to say about the web interface. Once you configure the switch, it’s not really a website I visit on a daily basis.

The Rating: 9/10

It’s missing a few small things (different LED settings for instance) but it’s a solid piece of hardware, and it hasn’t caused me any issues so far.



The Addendum:

Remember how I said that Ubiquiti have actually released two separate switch sets? They have. The Unifi switches are designed to be used with a software controller. If people are interested, I’ll give that a run-down at some point. Essentially, the Unifi switches are basically slightly dumber, more end-user friendly, managed switches. They still have Layer 3 support, but they don’t have the fully manual configuration page. It’s quite nice, if a little different.

 

Thanks for cracking it open and taking a few pics

 

Tip: Weigh yourself then weigh yourself with the switch in your hands. Subtract the first from the second and you have the weight of the object you are holding

Otherwise nice clean and to the point review.

 

I actually just finished deploying a Unifi 48x switch yesterday.
Substantially, they are very similar to the Edgeswitch i belevie, but aimed at enterprise networks with the unifi gear, rather than Edgeswitch which is apparently slightly more targetted at the carrier-level.

 

Internally, they are much the same device(see here). The difference is the firmware. A lot of complaining has been made about this on the Ubiquiti forums, as people who jumped early on the EdgeSwitch now want a Unifi switch, because, reasons.

That said, I like my EdgeSwitch, so whatever. And the 24 port Unifi switch I used is just as good.

FYI, Ubiquiti have done this with the EdgeRouter Lite <> Unifi Secure Gateway as well. Basically the same hardware, different firmware. I kinda like the idea myself. And, they've just released PoE powered routers (ER-X) which I think is a godsend, especially considering I have an EdgeSwitch which provides PoE.

 

yes, I considered the USG vs the ERLite for the most recent build, because it could be tied in to Unifi. I still might get myself one to play with (From the guy who has an ERLite, Juniper SSG20, Draytek2820 sitting around "for tests")

if the USG had additional ports, I would have given it stronger consideration but I wanted to be able to reserve a port for dual-wan, without giving away the dedicated voip port
I stilll may put a usg in later if they change where they want to go

 

https://dl.ubnt.com/datasheets/edgemax/EdgeSwitch_DS.pdf
states it has 8 traffic class queues but makes no mention of how much memory it has for said buffering.

OP: can you find any values in the product UI?

 

Passive POE pin out. Just looking at more detail on this pin out as I have purchased and used some AP's with the Edge router POE and used the passive injection (i think?) on those with a standard pin out and it seems to work without issue.

 

These don't have any routing protocol support beyond static do they? I couldn't see any reference to it in the datasheet or the forums. Multicast? Edit - PIM not IGMP

I'll pass for now, Juniper EX2200s seem a better deal.

 

The UI states that I have 103128 KBytes Allocated Memory and 153264 KBytes Free Memory, which I think means it has 256MB of memory available for tables, logs, etc. Mine isn't doing anything special to use 100MB, so its probably total system memory (i.e. Operating system as well as config, logs, routing tables, etc.).

POE+ IEEE 802.3af/at (Pins 1, 2+; 3, 6-)
24VDC Passive PoE (Pins 4, 5+; 7,

This information comes from here: https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeSwitch/passive-PoE-24V-wihch-pairs-are-used/td-p/993175

As it says in the post below the highlighted one (with the information), Ubiquiti are much more firm on which pins can be used. It has to be their configuration. However, not many other companies use it, so I suppose it doesn't really matter that much.

Depends. When it was purchased, I was messing with 10GBit network connections. For 10GBit, you can't get better. However, for 1GBit/s, definitely go with the Juniper.

I haven't been able to find any information regarding advanced routing in the web UI, but in the command sets, I can set up a route-map, which offers up BGP, OSPF and RIP. Apart from that, I can't seem to see anything that even vaguely points in the direction of PIM, etc.

 

Ah the MR900 AP I'm using is a 48v 802.11af compliment device but is working perfectly with the Edge Router POE router will look into why this is further.

 

The EdgeRouter PoE has both standards covered (i.e. 802.3af Passive PoE), see here: http://dl.ubnt.com/datasheets/edgemax/EdgeRouter_DS.pdf

Apparently you need to be using a 48VDC power supply.

 

I have the 48 volt power supply so that explains why its working.