I have been waiting for this for so long for these switches for so long, holy s**tballs.
I remember when we got the first inkling that Ubiquiti was making 100gig switches back
in like 2019, 2020, it's been that long for us to finally have one on hand to test out.
This is the ECS aggregation.
It stands for Enterprise Campus Switch and you know, aggregation I guess.
That one doesn't stand for anything. Wow, this is a different unboxing experience.
It opens from the top. I kind of like that. This is like how big stuff arrives and I mean, let's be honest here, this is a pretty
big box for a network switch. Are those rails?
They are rails. Hardware kit here. Power cables.
We'll get to that in a minute. There it is, boys and girls.
Oh my god. Oh my god.
I thought at this point it was a meme, the whole like having redundant power supplies
on the Ubiquiti switch. We've wanted it for so long and look at this.
A redundant, hot, swappable power supply.
But why is there only one? What is this?
There's the other one. This is, um, it's very chill lately.
This is, um, it's very chill labeling for a power supply.
So 550 watts, 100 to 240 volt, that's good.
Not that much power, but remember this is not a PoE switch.
So in theory it shouldn't need that much. Anyways.
It's just a little nice.
That's got a nice click to it. I'm so stoked about this, man.
You have no idea how long. How long have I been waiting to put two power supplies in my Ubiquiti switch like this?
Ain't no way. Hell yeah, brother.
How many is that? One, two, three, four, five. Five fans and they're hot, swappable.
This is Enterprise, baby. You guys finally did it.
Slow clap for Ubiquiti. I promise I'm not being sarcastic.
I'm actually just excited that we're finally here. Great.
I mean, these are just little, they're Delta fans, little single ones here.
Very cute. And then here. This is the money maker.
Round this side, boys and girls. We have 4825 gigabit SFP28 ports, along with six QSFP28 100 gig ports.
That works out to a combined 3.6 terabit per second of switching capacity in this bad girl.
Aside from all that, there is still the traditional Ubiquiti little screen on the front,
which I'm sure is a touch screen. You know, surprisingly not like a bunch of extra ventilation.
This is a pretty normal Ubiquiti amount.
There's no, there's no extra on the side. It is a little different on the side because it has rail holes.
I don't think that they're like the rails on the Cloud Key Enterprise where it's just a shelf that they sit on.
This will probably be actual rails that actually slide in and out.
Okay, these look like nice rails. Oh yeah, they're tool-less.
I like that. You know, in a universe where you were doing things properly, you would still screw them in.
But I don't know what universe that is because it's not the one I live in.
Kingslide. Oh yeah. Okay, so these are just like, these are just name brand rails.
I don't remember what other machine I saw with Kingslide rails,
but they are a company that makes rails for other companies from Taiwan.
The one thing I could potentially see as an improvement point here is adding little studs on this guy
so that you can put the slide on tool-lessly.
And the best part, like I said earlier, is we have two.
Why do we have two? Because this new switch, amongst a bunch of other things, which I'll mention later,
has multi-link aggregation, which if you're not familiar,
it allows you to take one device, like a server or another switch,
and uplink it to two other devices.
Pretty much every other switch vendor on the planet has had it forever,
but Ubiquiti has not, and now they do. It occurs to me, I did not look through the cable accessory box we have.
One cable, the other cable for the other power supply came in the power supply box,
so that makes sense. We have, oh, nice.
Loops in right there. You get your power cable, plug it in, and then loop the cord in the little thingy, tighten it.
Now you can't accidentally yank this out.
Not all switches have this. Some Dell ones I've interacted with have just like a cable tie looped around,
which I don't know if is better than this.
This is pretty easy. What else is in here? Oh, there is still ears.
Can you run this with just the ears?
I could check the instructions. Nope, doesn't say shit about that.
See you later.
Screws for the rails. Nice. More ear things.
That's it. Man, I think the only thing left that's missing on this switch is a dedicated management board.
That's the only thing I'm kind of going hmmm about.
But let's turn it on. Whoa!
Is it argaba? They have ether lighting, which is different when you have SFP and QSFP ports,
because there's no, like, thing to light up. They just made the little indicators light up.
That's cute. Chonk. Done deal, buddy.
That's how you network. And now this is all hooked up and ready to try out.
I've got the firmware updated on all of them. We got our dream machine up to date.
And I have a client machine here. This is a Mini's Forum MSO1.
It's a small Core i9 mini PC that happens to have a PCIe slot.
So I went ahead and put in a Kinect X6 dual 25 gig card,
which will allow us to uplink this computer to both of these switches.
I know. For a unify, this is unheard of.
But now, M-Leg, it should just work.
Right now, I just have the switches connected with one 100 gig cable,
and then to the dream machine with a 25 gig cable,
but really it's running at 10 gig. We're going to go in and set up the M-Leg in the software, hopefully.
And at that point, we'll be able to add another one of these cables.
So for the top one that only has one power spy, it says the second power spy is not installed.
Cool. So it's aware of that. On the bottom one, which does have both power spies, but one is unplugged.
It just says 0%, but it doesn't say unplugged or anything like that.
So ubiquity. I know you're watching this, so probably fix that.
Here's a further test. I want to take it out, like mid-operation.
Now will it complain? No, it just says not installed.
So there's probably some adjustments that can be made there. Given this is one of the first ubiquity products with redundant power,
I'm not too mad about that, but it's definitely something they should look at improving,
because it would be really good to know if your second power supply
that you're thinking is a backup isn't installed or failed or somehow lost power.
Now let's try the UI. I suspect the M-Lag thing is under port manager.
I do kind of wonder if the speed has to change in groups of four or groups of two.
If you've ever used one of their Enterprise XG24 switches,
which has the two 25 gig ports on the side,
those two ports, if you want to use 25 gig on one of them,
they both have to run at 25 gig. I don't know how that applies to this switch.
If there's groupings like on Dell switches, a lot of the time it'll be like four individual ports will be grouped together.
So if you want them at 25 gig, they all have to be at 25 gig. Or if you want to go 10 gig on one of them, none of them can do 25 gig.
I don't know how that works on this switch. So if I plug this guy out of here and into this port,
I suspect it will not work, because this one is running at 25 gig.
It's not lighting up. Okay.
What about this one? Oh, there we go.
Okay, so it did. It did light up.
Okay, let me put it back over here and see, because that took a while.
Oh, wait, it did turn on. What the hell?
What is this magic? I mean, don't get me wrong.
It would be sick if all of these ports could be independently controlled between 25 and 10 gig.
Like the Dell switch that we have in the server room is not like that.
When you have any port set at 25 gig, all of the rest of the four in that group have to also be at 25 gig,
which doesn't seem to be the case here. I don't know about the one directly underneath.
Let me try that. Maybe they're grouped in twos. I don't know. Just for reference, usually 25 gig ports are grouped in fours because it's like 100 gig connection split into four.
No, it turned on. So the one on top is at 25 gig and the one on the bottom is at 10 gig.
Sick. It makes it seem like in the dashboard that there's a limitation.
I think that might just be left over from the XG24.
It's probably just any time that 25 gig is set, it shows that warning,
but it doesn't seem to be the case on this switch, which is awesome.
Okay, let's make our MC leg.
I think we call this big, big, thick switches.
Stacking optional combines the top and bottom switch into a single entry.
I'm going to try that off for now.
And then we have multi chassis like directly connected ports between the top and bottom switch to form the M leg and forward traffic.
Increases throughput, aggregating ports, increases redundancy. Okay, set up.
So I picked 53 and 54 on each.
Save. So far, this UI is very nice and easy.
And then target devices membership. So target devices is where you would configure a client, whether that be another switch or a computer,
which in our case, we are using a computer.
So let's go ahead and configure. And we'll say number one on both of them, but I could pick a different one potentially.
Is that what it is? I mean, number one thing. Okay, save.
Hey, it's doing it. There we go.
Yes, we have it. We have an M leg now. Hey, multi chassis link status connected.
It seems like it just took, I don't know, 30 seconds to kind of do the magic behind the scenes.
It would be cool if there was like a loading indicator that popped up in the top right like, hey, we're processing this change or something like that.
Just so you knew what was going on. But not the end of the world.
I'm going to configure this box now to have a link aggregation and then we'll see if the sauce works.
Now that we've got our minis forum connected, I can set up a link aggregation says target device membership is not established.
Please check that all ports are connected with the same speed and that a lag is configured on the target device.
I just configured the lag on the target device. So in theory, now in a moment or two, it should pop up and say, yo, dog, you're lag or gated.
Hey, connected. Look at that. This is now running across two switches.
That's pretty cool. I mean, I know that it's, we do this every day with the Dell switches, but this is, this is new for you, big buddy.
This is crazy. I'm so excited.
Now they have a proper redundant option for like a high speed core switch.
Not only is this their first like 100 gig offering, but it's also pretty compelling package.
They actually built out the feature set before releasing it, which is really cool.
It's got redundant power. It's got redundant cooling. I don't know if there's anything to complain about here, aside from the lack of a dedicated management port.
How much does this thing cost? This is $4,000 US.
So if we have two, that's $8,000 US in ubiquity land.
That's crazy. I'm setting up a second minis for him so we can do a little speed test and I just hit apply.
So I have IPERF running on one machine as a server and on the other, I'm running it as a client.
It's doing 40 gigabit and this is just at 1500 MTU.
We're not using jumbo frames or allowing the machines to send bigger packets with less overhead,
which is usually something you need to do. Well, less so these days, but frequently in the past, something you need to do to be able to achieve speeds like this.
But 1500 MTU across both switches, like 50 gig, these are only 25 gig ports.
That means it's using both ports on our machines here.
I'm going to do something a little funky and I'm not going to uplink both of them to both switches.
I'm going to take one of them and move it to a single switch.
That way, to achieve the full bandwidth of both cables, it will have to cross the links that go between the two switches.
It should be exactly the same. Realistically, we're not even close to pushing these switches at all.
Oh, I can't actually do that.
It blocks it out and says use MC leg group to configure aggregation.
I guess there's not really any reason you should do what I was just proposing other than to just try this out.
But that's interesting. It would be cool if you could name the aggregation devices in here.
I know that you can name the ports, but it would be sick if there was a name field and then that automatically applied to the ports itself.
I like on Dell's enterprise switches that you can basically put a description on anything, which is very helpful.
Ubiquity, you should do that. That would be great.
So I'm going to unplug one port from each of these devices.
We'll unplug this mini's forum from the top switch and then I'm going to unplug this mini's forum from the bottom switch.
That way, they're each connected only to one of them.
So if we run a speed test now, that traffic is going to have to go through this cable across our multi chassis links to the other one.
And I want to just make sure that that still works.
Yeah. Okay. Everything's fine.
We're traversing our multi chassis links like nothing even happened.
Lovely. Now if I plug these back in, will it just pick up the speed without having to restart the test?
47 gigabit. They're nice.
For the amount of setup required, if you already had your devices like computers or servers or switches already plugged into both ports, you're talking like 30 seconds of setup.
The last thing I want to see is the stack mode because that sounds pretty dope.
And, okay, I wasn't really sure what I was expecting, but it's just two switches on one page.
Which, yeah, okay, great. I mean, overall, this has been super seamless.
I got to see what's inside this switch though. I'm going to have to open it.
Haha, LTT Store precision screwdriver set.
I like. Well, I take these things apart. It would be good to mention that they are layer three switches.
So they are going to have VRRP, which is basically a redundant routing protocol available soon.
And then also BGP on these switches, which is pretty cool.
I think they're not in the current network version coming soon kind of vibe.
So who knows when that will be. And I wouldn't buy it based on that until that feature is out and tested.
You can use this as a router, run a network on the individual switch, have it be DHCP or DHCP relayed.
If you want. I'm very curious to see what type of switch chip is in here.
Because when they originally made the kind of like demo early access version of a hundred gig switch,
which like I mentioned before was a long time ago, it used not like a tier one switch chip.
So not from like Broadcom or anything like that. It was from a less common slash popular brand, which some people did not like.
Hey, oh, look at that. It's not that full.
It's a fair bit of empty space in here. I mean, it's not uncommon for switches of this size.
It looks like the reason for the empty space here is so the power supplies fit and plug right into the board.
Show me what you've got. Whoa, what's going on here? Why is there a LAN port?
What are you doing in there, Ethernet jack? I swear to God, if they worked in the functionality to have a management port and then decided not to put it on.
Oh, my God, that would be so, so silly.
Look at that. They got a custom PCB here for the fan power and fan control.
That's cool. There's a CMOS battery in here. I guess that makes sense.
This is an FPGA right here, field programmable gate array.
It's kind of like a CPU, but can be customized.
They usually use those on applications where it's not worth building custom silicon and still needed to be fast.
And then an m.2 slot that has no storage in it.
I'm very confused why there's like a daughter board that has a lot of cooling on it.
It looks like it could be socketed, which would be interesting.
I mean, what could be under here? Either a CPU or a switch chip, but I think over here is the switch chip.
So this must be a processor. Maybe.
What the hell?
This is the computer that runs the switch. You see there's a memory slot there.
And then if you look inside, I'll take this off.
There is another memory slot. So this is actually the brains of this switch.
I don't know why it's on a daughter board. That's very cool.
I guess that means you could replace this if it failed.
I mean, usually the high end switches from other companies are also built in a modular fashion like this.
At least to some degree. Hey, look at that.
There's a Kingston RAM stick. It's a 16 Gigabyte DDR4 3200 megatransfer stick.
And then that's an Intel C3558R CPU.
Four quarters, four threads, 2.4 gigahertz base clock, and it's 17 watts.
It's from 2020. It's not a crazy CPU by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't know what kind of like throughput there is between this board and the switch itself.
It's not a crazy fast CPU on its own. So I imagine it's not doing a ton of fancy routing stuff.
This computer module over here is like this. I guess because they're going to use this platform for other things.
But I found out the switch actually runs Sonic, which is an open source switch operating system, which is really cool.
So this little computer here runs ubiquities management software and Sonic and allows those to work together
and use this Sonic switch with ubiquities controller and to manage everything, which is cool.
I mean, Sonic is great. And I'm glad that they're using it because it seems like a pretty obvious choice.
Question then is what switch chip is this using?
Marvell. This is a 98CX8514A0.
I mean, that's great. They're a big name switch chip manufacturer.
I don't know if people classify them as like the best.
I know people kind of have a hard on for Broadcom. But yeah, I guess I've seen what I needed to see.
It would be cool if they had m.2 storage on here so that you could swap it.
But I guess if you had an issue with the soldered storage that's on here,
you could use the m.2 slot here to replace it and reinstall it.
Seems like a pretty sick switch. It's four grand.
It's out of my budget. But if you're looking for a top of rack switch that has multi chassis link aggregation and you need 25 or 100 gig,
seems like this could be a decently affordable option.
I'm happy that they did most of the feature stuff before they released the switch.
If they had released this and been like, oh yeah, MLAG, it's coming later.
I'd be like, I know that they still did that with BGP and VRRP, but at least that is there.
And I'm excited to see what other switches are going to have MLAG come to them because that's a pretty sick feature.
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And if you're looking for something else to watch, why not check out the Unify Cloud Gateway Max.
Kind of a different vibe than this. But if you needed a cheap controller because you spent all your money on six switches,
I kind of doubt it makes sense, but maybe, maybe it's an option.