Unmanaged switches don’t care about VLAN tags, spanning trees, management interfaces, or LACP.
Managed switches care about at least some of those features and therefore will have a management interface to configure them, as well as firmware supporting them.
A dumb/unmanaged switch will look up the MAC address of the intended recipient and map that to a port before forwarding a packet to a particular port. A managed switch might do a lot more.
If you don’t need aanaged switch, don’t buy one. If you’re OK with everything on one port being able to communicate with anything on another port, and connectivity is you’re only concerned, you’re probably going to be fine with an unmanaged switch.
Source: I manage (amongst other things) managed switches for a living.
Would you say you’re a managed switch manager? Do you have any aspirations of eventually becoming a manager of other managed switch managers? And if so, how would you manage that?
I wouldn’t, as managed switching is only a small subset of the managerial tasks I attend. I don’t manage individual switches as much as I manage production systems where managed switch management is only a minor component.
On that note, we actually use hubs in one particular place in these systems, and since I manage their installation and asset tracking, does this make them managed Ethernet hubs?
Unmanaged switches don’t care about VLAN tags, spanning trees, management interfaces, or LACP.
Managed switches care about at least some of those features and therefore will have a management interface to configure them, as well as firmware supporting them.
A dumb/unmanaged switch will look up the MAC address of the intended recipient and map that to a port before forwarding a packet to a particular port. A managed switch might do a lot more.
If you don’t need aanaged switch, don’t buy one. If you’re OK with everything on one port being able to communicate with anything on another port, and connectivity is you’re only concerned, you’re probably going to be fine with an unmanaged switch.
Source: I manage (amongst other things) managed switches for a living.
Would you say you’re a managed switch manager? Do you have any aspirations of eventually becoming a manager of other managed switch managers? And if so, how would you manage that?
I wouldn’t, as managed switching is only a small subset of the managerial tasks I attend. I don’t manage individual switches as much as I manage production systems where managed switch management is only a minor component.
On that note, we actually use hubs in one particular place in these systems, and since I manage their installation and asset tracking, does this make them managed Ethernet hubs?