And why are managed switches so much more expensive than unmanaged ones?
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?
An unmanaged switch is a simple, zero-configuration network device that connects multiple Ethernet devices together. This is by far the most common type of switch because they’re cheaper to make and satisfy most needs in the home and small office. There are no settings to configure, and the device generally avoids inspecting the traffic it switches. Unmanaged switches are commodity products that are all pretty much same, varying only in the number of ports and speeds provided, and produced in large volumes.
Managed switches add a central CPU for device administration. This design enables configuration settings which is usually an important precursor to have features such as VLANs, QoS, IGMP snooping, and port security. Businesses usually need managed switches to implement security policies. In addition to the added hardware, businesses have deeper pockets, and managed switches are no longer simple commodities because comparing the advanced feature set and software is no longer trivial. Professional managed switches can cost thousands.
Only recently have we seen pro-sumer switches occupy the space in between these two options by offering some managed features (VLANs) while reserving necessary enterprise features (port security, DHCP snooping, reporting) to segment the market. I bought one for $25 the other day which is almost the same as an unmanaged switch. I would no longer recommend buying an unmanaged switch to anyone with even a passing interest in home networking.
An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal.
Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2).
Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).
I had a nasty virus in my network and had to get a managed switch to port mirror into an ids. Sadly my IDs was so badly configured I never found it that way. Random repeated virus scans on all the windows gear in the house finally found it
My favorite feature is being able to selectively reboot the POE ports for my security cameras. I have Blue Iris tell Home assistant that a camera is offline and then with the home assistant integration for Netgear it sends the reboot POE command.
Some reolink cameras get in a weird mode where rtsp is broken but direction connecting to the cam stays working. I could issue the reboot command directly from the reolink integration but I find a full power reboot keeps them running longer than just a reboot.
Unmanaged switches just do their thing, managed switches let you tell them what that thing is.
Unmanaged switches are extremely dumb. They do simple things, and do them well.
Managed switches have lots of other shiny features, which is why they are more expensive. They also have to be configured to enable those features, which means you have to know how to drive them
Why are they so much more expensive…
Because people will pay that much for those features. You can find managed switches for $60 pretty easily. Until you get into the 48port blades they don’t change a whole lot, so the higher prices are typically from different ways to trick you into paying more.
Some features like line rate, buffers, do add to the cost though.
you can web into a managed switch
