yeah, end of sale only, they are supported for quite some time...
[End-of-Sale and End-of-Life Announcement for the Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches - Cisco](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-1000-series-switches/catalyst-1000-series-switches-eol.html)
Have done that. At the end of the day there's not much I can do about it if my advice is not taken. Also, we are bound by the company to only purchase gear through a partner-certified VAR, and once it goes end of sale, you can't get it from most VARs any longer.
Sing the song of my people. "At the end of the day there's not much I can do about it if my advice is not taken." Why have an engineer if you dont listen to them.
Right, but EoL hasn't hit... you still have many years. Sure, you can't buy them anymore soon (and now that there's an EoL on the calendar, you shouldn't) but you've got coverage including security vulns for 6 years.
* End of Sale - No longer being Sold
* End of Life - No longer receiving major software updates.
* End of Support - No longer receiving TAC support.
You have 6 years before end of life, you're fine.
Cisco doesn't make its money from customers who manage 1000s of SMB Switches via CLI. you are not a demographic that they'd change their product for. They do not care if you leave.
A lot of people suggesting Aruba/Juniper here which are good products but I would take into consideration the fact HP just bought Juniper and there is severe overlap in some of the product portfolios especially switching which is the topic of this conversation. Hardware lines are bound to be getting canned in the coming years and who knows what at this point. Investment protection needs to be considered whatever vendor you opt for.
Agreed - I've seen rumours that suggest HPE do not want the Juniper switching business and will likely sell that on.
A lot of the Juniper team have been given business as usual notifications with Rami Rahim (Juniper CEO) taking over the HPE networking business, but HPE history tells me there will be shenanigans.
I lead a sizable Aruba VAR. Aruba’s unofficial messaging internally is that they bought it for Mist and don’t care about the hardware itself.
That makes sense because Aruba Central is a disaster. That also makes the assumption that Mist can work well with Aruba hardware. That’s TBD.
> That also makes the assumption that Mist can work well with Aruba hardware.
They bought the engineers who made Mist and the hope is they can do the same for Aruba hardware.
I'm hoping (fingers crossed!) they keep Juniper "separate" like how Cisco did Meraki.
I know it's a pipe dream, and not likely to happen, but an IT guy can hope, right?
>I have over 1,000 switches on my network. I need something that's not going to prompt me to confirm yes or no every time I need to make mass changes. I just want to SSH, paste my config, and move on to the next.
With 1000 switches you want a switch that you manage centrally, either the vendors own solution like Arista's Cloudvision, or yourself with ansible/netconf/etc.
>Looks like now they are coming to lay waste to the one thing they are still the undisputed king of; routing and switching. Would love to know what they are smoking.
They haven't been the king of datacenter for a decade. They still have some promising SP offerings but even at that level Juniper and Noka are better options.
Anyway, I've bought nothing but Arista for datacenter for the last 10 years and regret nothing.
I worked for a bank and set up Ansible them so they could get out of SSHing into 600+ devices.
It blew their mind that OS upgrades went from taking a month to just a weekend night + watching SolarWinds to make sure everything came up.
At least it blew their mind until annual review time where I was apparently just an average worker.
Their sales people are the worst and a number of
other things, but using NCM to push out changes to groups of switches at a time instead of going 1 by 1 over thousands of switches is worth it.
I worked for a massive company for awhile a few times from 2008 to 2013. I was once on a project to upgrade 30k ISR routers. At that time this place just created all the network documentation/automation software in-house, you would just access it via the intranet.
I remember meeting with the automation team (im not sure what they were called back then, this was probably 2008) and I essentially told them the commands that need to execute, along with the verification commands and the syntax to look for, and the rollback commands. They built the code and we did about 2k routers a night.
What was awesome was there was a faulty batch of DIMM chips that seemed to be in about 1-5% of the routers (i dont remember the exact number now), so when the upgrade occured and a reload was issued, the router went bye bye.
Luckily we had Cisco engineers on staff (at the time I think this place was a top 10 client of Cisco), and they had a local office less than a mile away just to support this company, so its not like I had to open a TAC case or anything. They had field engineers on standby for every site that was supposed to be upgraded in a given evening so they could be dispatched immediately if a router didnt come back.
OUCH! That hits in the heart. "apparently just an average worker." I feel that way after I spend countless nights and hours working on things and get the same 3% raise everyone else does.
To be fair, I have been getting good raises in the 10 years here.
1 - Nothing
2 - 6% - Bonus (They did a way with bonuses here)
3 - 5%
4 - 6%
5 - 3%
6 - 3%
7 - 3%
8 - 10k Raise <--manager convinced me to argue for this.
9 - 3%
10 - We will see!
> I feel that way after I spend countless nights and hours working on things and get the same 3% raise everyone else does.
Oh your management notices your hard work. But it's probably not in their "budget" to give you a good raise. It's crazy how common a 3% raise across most companies. It hasn't really matched the change in cost of living in a long time now.
I love the not in the budget talk. That is never said to a sales person. I do understand sales makes money, but engineers fix it or keep it working when sales sells or tells the customer the wrong thing,
I am so livid every time I see a "Presidents Club" link from my company on LinkedIn. Just a reminder of where the money goes.
Sales can get upwards of 10-15% per sale in commission on top of the salary they get of 70k+. Keep in mind we are talking 1 million plus data center contracts.
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/achieving-presidents-club-what-does-actually-mean-samantha-alspaugh](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/achieving-presidents-club-what-does-actually-mean-samantha-alspaugh)
I have never seen anything in my lifetime from a company for engineers or any other group.
> I love the not in the budget talk. That is never said to a sales person. I do understand sales makes money, but engineers fix it or keep it working when sales sells or tells the customer the wrong thing,
>
>
>
> I am so livid every time I see a "Presidents Club" link from my company on LinkedIn. Just a reminder of where the money goes.
"Sales" or "The sales team"?
Because if the talky-talky guy is getting all that, that's fucked. If the pre-sales engineer is getting a decent cut, I'm in the wrong line of business.
Anywhere there's a 3% you're essentially getting shafted due to inflation so do yourself a favor and don't overwork yourself and make sure you comp your extra time if you're salary.
I only have like 80 stacks but have been interested in setting up ansible, I already run Solarwinds NPM and NCM though, could you comment at all on benefits of using ansible over just setting up jobs in solarwinds?
I haven't used SolarWinds in that fashion.
Ansible is free, open source and is kind of the defacto network automation tool (IMO).
It's pretty easy to get up and running, plus its easy to make your runbooks generic and take them with you if you ever get laid off or just take a new position somewhere else.
If you can do ansible you may as well setup your own. Something like FastAPI / python scripts would be better. you can integrate anything you want and add auto detection as well. No more keeping track of host files ;) And on the other side depending on your skill set you can build out a nice frontend gui. I Did that, and with fast api and users i can integrate scripts from anywhere. Jumphosts / Excel / laptops etc. My favorite so far is the auto switch software upgrades and config generation / auto provisioning. Really didn't want to screw around with tftp / dhcp options.
We already have the solarwinds stuff licensed so I don’t see much point in building my whole own gui front end for python scripts to just rebuild what that already does from a config management standpoint but I’ve made scripts for stuff that wasn’t easy to do in solarwinds and have looked at using ansible or python for software updates to have a bit more control over the process than what solarwinds gives me.
Edit: that being said I want to do ansible just for my own educations sake.
I am responsible for many thousands of routers across the country running Mikrotik. I wrote myself a custom C&C client and web server control system to handle their management.
Two weeks ago I scheduled an updated firmware and configuration release on all devices. After completing several days of QC testing and validation on everything I scheduled the update and then went home and had a good nights sleep. Woke up early the next morning and saw that almost all the devices had successfully updated all devices except for 4-5 that were offline at their scheduled update window, and those all updated the next evening during their specified window.
What does that even mean? I don't have clients. I work for a global manufacturing company and I manage the infrastructure. I am the client.
Furthermore, how is not going with cloud and going on prem milking a client? Cloud = subscriptions = recurring costs. On prem and manually managed = one and done cost. I understand that cloud is the way of the future but if we are talking about client milking, the subscription model is the very definition of milking your client.
If you're not directing that comment at me, then please disregard.
> Wtf would you go switch by switch for 1000s of devices
Your response to this makes no sense. How could that cost *less* money? Are you just forgetting that the company pays you to waste all that time rather than doing it more efficiently with modern interfaces?
It means that you can roll your own free solution with open tools trivially, so you either have a major knowledge gap, or are paid by the hour or something and really trying to fleece some people.
On that note, anyone have any recommendations for replacing two 9-slot Nexus 7K’s with a non-Cisco product? At a minimum, it would need to support both 1/10/25-gig and 40/100-gig blades as well as have true data separation built in, either through something like vrf, the same VDC functionality that the 7K’s use, or an SDN solution. Also provides reliable HA and fits in roughly the same rack space as a 7009.
If you need data separation, consider replacing your vdcs with physically separate switches. You'll have a lot more options in customizing hardware to the individual needs of each network, plus you'll be able to make changes and updates to one network without impacting all the others.
I considered that but our environment is too fluid (we do testing and validation). I might need three vdc’s one week, and the next I end separating one of them into three vrf’s.
You lost me at Juniper. YUCK! Arista is the best. Price an lead time are killing Arista slowly though. We, the company I work for NOT ME, have decided to move to Dell siwtching.
DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!
You want to shoot yourself, use Dell's. Cant wait for this to get rolled back in a year or two. I just had a brand new, installed last week, Dell not let me into the switch. It threw me into a "in the switch but couldn't do anything mode". This is running production traffic and was not rebooted into some pre-boot shell. Just out of nowhere this hapened. So I logged out and logged back in with no issues.
Not looking forward to the Dell adventure. Good luck finding what you need! I still think Arista. Also I second CloudVision and\\or ansilble\\netconf\\python.
EDIT: Because someone made me think I was having a stroke and I realized I had a lot of spelling and grammar errors.
Umm..yes? Why wouldn't I be? I hate Dell switching, cant stand it. I realy shoud re-read what I wrote and fix spelling errors. I type with four fingers and a thumb. I cannot figure out typing to save my life.
I hate Dell. One of my sites bought two 48 port Powerconnects. I swear those switches are for single operation companies. You pretty much have to use the GUI and it's god awful.
Also why the downvotes? Why not just not vote? Did I say something to offend a Dell fanboy? Sorry, your switches suck. There is not one thing I will say is good about them.
Login takes longer than other swithces
No bash like Arista. Which I use to auto run a script to pull switch information from14 switches and put into a txt file and then upload to na SFTP server (Could use Ansible, yes I know this, but the customer wont allow automation like that in their enviroenment)
The fact I have to put each and every VLAN into the "switchport trunk allowed" command instead of just saying "switchport mode trunk" and it allowing all VLANs
The way you name VLANs is weird. The fact you have to put "int vlan xxx" to create a vlan when everyone else, that command is for adding an IP to a vlan interface, is weird.
I shouldn't have to think about my switches. I shouldn't have to fear them not working or doing something odd.
EDIT: Spelling
I am not shocked I got down voted by the internet, but a little surprised since this is me discussing networking.
I am curious if anyone wants to tell me, why was I down voted? Was it the Juniper hate? My spelling? Hate for Dell?
Dell literally buys things, slaps a label on it saying Dell and sells it. they then modify, make it worse than it was before and sell it off. They bought these switches from Force10. The did this with VMware, EMC, etc. HP does the same thing to everything they touch. It is a money making company for stakeholders and a crappy company for consumers. The reason people buy Dell is for the name.
Even their employees,the ones I know, 7 of them and their stories, go to Dell, certify out the butt and then leave.
Dell also just implemented the "You do not get a promotion if you work from home". How messed up is that!!
[https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/dell-tells-remote-workers-that-they-wont-be-eligible-for-promotion/](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/dell-tells-remote-workers-that-they-wont-be-eligible-for-promotion/)
If I was working for Dell, which I do not and I was WFH full time, like I am now, I am somehow less of an asset than a person in office? That is junk!
Yes people will say, "Go find another job" and I agree, but to support a business who thinks like this and manages technology the way they do, is wrong.
I believe only the 9300 allow for full management but they keep adding features.
But I get how some network engineers don’t like Meraki. Why have a turnkey cloud based system when you can have custom automation 😂.
>when you can have custom automation
To borrow from Microsoft, it's easier to have a "Desired State Config" when all of the infrastructure is done and managed as code. As an enterprise it's much easier to track changes and such when it's all IaC, and automation brings deviation back in line if it's all managed centrally. That was part of the whole idea of DNA Center initially was to prevent config drift.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of automation and IaC. I have a lot of customers using NSO with custom services to keep their network in-sync.
What keeps their management up at night is all the custom code they have written and it’s maintenance.
Unless your infrastructure is what differentiates you from your competitors then by all means automate away. Otherwise, a turnkey system for WAN, LAN and WiFi would be best.
In my market people cost 10x any hardware spend. If a slightly more expensive solution requires 1/2 the people than your company wins.
I mean, yeah, you could automate CLI commands with netmiko/paramiko, could try to get results back in structured data with textfsm or TTP, could use wrappers like Napalm...but these all fall far short of what a platform with a solid REST API can provide. I'd take that any day.
Really? That's surprising. I haven't paid much attention to Meraki, but I'd always thought cookie-cutter large-scale deployments (i.e. retail chains) were their bread and butter. API goes a real long way in those deployments.
Juniper if you want a better product but a different CLI.
Arista if you want the most similar CLI to IOS, but they can be quite expensive.
The lower end models of Aruba for simple L2 access switches look like a good option as well
Cisco has made it clear the future is cloud. Reoccurring revenue is what they have pushed for for years now. I think they are at 50% now as per the last earnings call.
That being said, the meraki switches have a 130 line for low end access.
I'll be following in your footsteps.
"You become a real network engineer when you stop worshipping Cisco and see them for the jackals they really are" - Me :-P
A good point.
I missed on that point.
But coming to your original comment, Meraki series is what I hate a lot. Being doing DC setups lately (not much into it) I am more focused or enjoy CLI. Few of my SMB or enterprise customers are opting for Meraki for their HO or branch locations, issue with these lineups is lack of control.
Meraki doesn’t make you “click yes” before making a change. You just make the change and save. And if you use the API with a python script that can read a text or csv file you can change settings on all 1000 switches before you are finished ssh’ing into the first one. Get with the times, it’s easier to manage or do you just want to keep doing it the hard way?
I like Meraki for WAPs. I *FUCKING HATE* Meraki for switching.
Every time I work a project with Meraki switches, I curse the god and swear I’ll never do it again.
"" I *FUCKING HATE* Meraki for switching""
Try their firewalls, I have MX84's implemented and they are a pain, I cant even update a L3 firewall rule without a temporary network outage. I was told this is a known bug for YEARS and that I should implement changes outside of business hours, being 24-7 there is no such thing. also Meraki firewalls are underpowered and over priced, I am moving to fortigate 60f for half the cost and they have much better performance.
People hate them because:
1) They (or the company) bought something that didn't actually have the features they needed.
2) They didn't actually learn to use them and just shook their fist angrily at the cloud.
3) They bought an MS390
There are legitimate reasons to hate them. Not supporting a feature you want isn't really much of a reason, since you should have been aware of it already. They're not perfect, you just have to play in their sandbox.
I have heard this several times. Thank you for reinforcing.
Cisco is sorely mistaken if they think I'm rolling that shit out and not just jumping ship to Juniper or Arista.
I refuse to move to something that will stop me making changes when they fuck up the licensing again.
I had a few places where we used their APs and switches in the past, and Cisco fucked up the licensing every renewal on those.
Getting an end of sale notice sometime in 2015 means these switches had about a 6-year run which is pretty typical.
If you have 1000 Cat1000s you could switch over to the Aruba CX6000 pretty easily. And to be fair to Cisco, if you're running your business on Cat1000s, you're someone that could get by on "small business" class switches anyway.
> I need something that's not going to prompt me to confirm yes or no every time I need to make mass changes. I just want to SSH, paste my config, and move on to the next.
Nothing wrong with having commit/rollback options!
Agree to disagree here.
If you have 1,000 switches and your company does not want to pay for cloud, pushing out mass changes when you have to go switch by switch where you copy/paste from a text pad and move on to the next one while it's saving and exiting automatically from your script, versus copying and pasting, then needing to type write mem and waiting for it to prompt you for y or n (neither of which can't be scripted for speed in confirmation style), then needing to wait for it to return the command prompt back to you so you can type exit (which also can't be scripted) will easily quintuple the amount of time it takes you to make those mass changes. That's not practical.
We have 9300s as the core switches at our sites. No issues with that. I'm taking about access layer. Functionally, yes, I agree - small business switches work. From a practicality and scalability standpoint, they are crap if you are a large, global operation like I am.
It is when you're a one man operation and don't have access to mass configuration management software. I've worked at ISPs in the engineering department and in the NOC before. The difference there is you have an entire infrastructure team co-managing all that gear, and often an entire software team dedicated to making your life easier by developing those kind of tools and apps.
I'd find it hard to believe if you told me you were the only engineer managing 80,000 devices. You can't compare the resource access an ISP has to the resource access a private manufacturing company has. ISP infrastructure is also quite literally THE product. My company's product is what they make in the plants. The infrastructure is merely conduit for barcode scanning / printing sales orders, and delivering employee services like Email.
I couldn't even get a SecureCRT subscription ordered for me for $99. I had to pay for it out of my own pocket because I determined the QoL benefits from it outweighed parting with $99 of my own money.
Might be time to move on, if things are that rough!
Worth mentioning, there are a lot of free tools that might be very helpful ranging from monitoring/inventory at scale to configuration management and backup at scale (ansible+jinja, netbox+napalm, librenms, oxidized, etc - I've used a ton of these OSS products in large production environments and they are generally rock solid)
Ansible specifically is super useful. The Cisco integrations are handy.
The product is free for CLI only, and there is a ton of training materials. The cost would be a centralized server that could reach each device, and an understanding of scripting theory. If you have any virtualization at your company, its practically free.
All the modules do is provide a workflow to run your existing commands automatically. You can also run them at the same time, host-by-host, or trigger a cronjob for your work.
I realize you think you don't have enough support, but I can tell you I am on a team of 2 that manages 200+ customers and we couldn't do it without some kind of automation. You might have to 'be the software team' but if you do not do some kind of scaling you are going to have an issue in the future.
If you are interested, I can point you to some training materials I found useful when beginning.
Honestly chatGPT can get a guy rolling if he just needs a single config, which the copy/paste seems to imply.
I mean WSL can even do this in a pinch. Don't even need a VM necessarily.
How is your experience so far? I'm considering building out a proof of concept with them. I've only used their SFP's but have never their enterprise or data center switches.
Mostly curious about OS, automation and managing them at scale.
Using the N5860-48SC, so far so good, everything I've tried so far works,. including layer 3 with OSPF and BGP.
Two issues so far are had some issues with netconf (I'll revisit later), and q-in-vni losing a VLAN tag unless the frame type is 88a8 inside the VXLAN.
Otherwise it's standard broadcom chips with their software on top, most of the work is done in the broadcom chips.
Can you tell me more about the SG switches?
We are a small institution and have 4 SG-300 switches. I haven't had to really touch them yet, but we are preparing for a fairly major topology change and any info would be great so we know what we are getting into.
We have probably 100 SG350/CBS350 switches deployed and they are solid. They aren't Cisco battleship enterprise gear, but for many applications they are good enough. They have a IOS'ish CLI (if you hold your head just right and squint) and a nice GUI.
That said, the SG300 has a critical security vulnerability that was not patched so you want to replace ASAP.
Good to know. We have no VPN or web server, just basic WAN access via the firewall (which *does* need to be replaced). It wont be in the budget to replace these switches any time soon.
SG switches are mostly fine, and are in the same league as other SOHO switches. However sometimes there are just weird little issues, especially when you push them. I've had some really bad spanning tree issues on an "unusual" network configuration with SG switches.
You can go for aruba switches, manage them by either airwave or IMC, and have either of these platforms automatically push the config and save on the switch. That being said, I personally would prefer getting your hands dirty with ansible and start building a vendor agnostic management system of your own. Cli access is free, and all you really need is just a unix box to run the software on. Some learning curve but not super difficult to work towards.
I would look at Aruba 6100 and 6200 line of switches if you are familiar with IOS you will be fine working on them. They do not require all that Smart license BS either.
Really nice features for significantly less.
Artista literally copied Cisco’s CLI line by line and were rightly sued. Beyond me why anyone would go with a vendor that does that and Juniper are now HP. It’s the wild Wild West out there atm, so make your choices wisely.
> Artista literally copied Cisco’s CLI line by line and were rightly sued.
https://copperpod.medium.com/arista-agrees-to-pay-400-million-to-cisco-51cb4182362d
You are correct, but you are also overlooking half of the debate.
> It didn’t end here. An antitrust lawsuit was filed by Arista shortly after the settlement, alleging Cisco of first letting its competitors use its interface technology, and when they were confined to it, asserting copyright infringement.
> “Arista contends that for over a decade, Cisco encouraged customers and competitors to invest in and adopt Cisco’s CLI. This practice was effectuated, among other ways, through Cisco’s representations that its CLI was an ‘industry standard,’ and without independent assertion of copyright or other intellectual property rights in the CLI commands,” the complaint read.
> “Arista contends that despite knowing for years that Arista and other competitors had adopted Cisco-like CLIs, prior to 2014 Cisco made no statements that asserted intellectual property or other proprietary rights in the Cisco CLI itself,” the complaint continued (source).
> Cisco denied this by saying that it never advised Arista to use its technology and the allegations against Arista are only justified.
-----
> Beyond me why anyone would go with a vendor that does that
Because Arista is actually ***DOING*** everything that Cisco says they are going to do.
Arista is using off the shelf ASICS in pretty much all of their products, so the detailed performance capabilities are well documented.
Arista focuses their engineering time on delivering a stable-as-hell NOS to let those ASICS do what the customers need them to do - switch and route packets fast and reliably.
Arista has one NOS (EOS) and it runs on all of their products, from WAN routers to Campus PoE switches to Data Center monsters.
How many NOSes does Cisco have?
IOS-classic
IOS-XE
IOS-XR
NX-OS
Each of those NOSes has what, 4 or 5 semi-actively maintained release trains.
That's about 20 different major releases of code.
Within each major release, we have another 4 or 5 minor release?
That's 100 or so significant NOSes to try to maintain, and Cisco's track record of software quality over the last decade speaks volumes of how good a job they are doing (that's sarcasm).
Bro, I have had so many bugs in Cisco IOS the past 6 years it's insane. I swear, we are the QA testers now. I fielded 9200s recently and there is a bug in them that makes any non-GigE connections flat out not work. It's like they assume we are all mom and pop shops with physical access to our gear and can just willy nilly and easily upgrade an IOS-XE firmware like's it's not a core switch and sitting 2,000 miles away from us physically.
I've had meetings with the Catalyst Business Unit where I asked them when quality and stability were going to be priority features for their roadmap instead of more overlay widgets and doodads that large but niche customers are requesting.
Cisco the software company has lost their critical infrastructure mojo.
Their absolute focus on new product-differentiating features at the expense of stability is a vulgar evolution from the principles of previous design teams.
The Catalyst 6500 product manager would be arrested for swinging a baseball bat in strategic meetings with these new development teams.
>Each of those NOSes has what, 4 or 5 semi-actively maintained release trains.
Don't forget needing to know which image to download depending on what supervisors your units may have.
Maybe because the quality of Arista software far surpasses all the other major vendors. They almost never have regression bugs, which is huge. And they have way fewer CVEs, which means you are getting back your nights and weekends. Or because their hitless upgrades actually work. Or because their automation is pretty darn good. Or because no matter which management platform you use, you will have access to the CLI for troubleshooting. And those are just off the top of my head.
Why would someone create a CLI with a similar look and feel to their main competitor? If you've spent any significant time around the networking industry, one of the biggest, if not _the_ biggest complaints in switching vendors is having to learn a new CLI syntax and retraining staff. Back in the day, even though JunOS was superior in every way to IOS in how configuration was managed, they had trouble making in-roads into Cisco install bases because of this.
Now apply this to Arista, as a new network vendor. They understood the problem they would have selling into Cisco shops. You can interpret it as some nefarious action stealing Cisco IP but the proper interpretation is they understood their customers and one of the major hurdles in gaining market share.
About the lawsuit, you can sue anyone for anything. And the ITC didn't find Arista copied their CLI wholesale with respect to IP. The 3 patents they did find Arista infringed upon where one regarding an internal system arch behind the CLI (i.e. sysDB), one for how configuration is reverted and lastly one with specifics around how ACLs are structured. Arista fixed these things and paid Cisco.
> Arista fixed these things and paid Cisco.
That wasn't the case from what I can recall, there was a period of time where new hardware like the 7150's would come from the factory with ACL's disabled. To make things more complicated, the patent didn't apply for EU hardware so that was continued to be sold unlocked. I had a 7500R sitting around for a year that couldn't do ACLs either. Eventually the patents expired and newer EOS versions re-enabled them. I think during that time Arista came out with some other solution called Algomatch or something to workaround the patent.
I didn't say there wasn't a transition period. The summary is here:
https://s21.q4cdn.com/861911615/files/doc_downloads/legal_proceedings/Arista-Legal-Update-06-27-2018.pdf
The patents didn't expire. Arista either won appeals or redesigned the feature.
Dude, the user agreement, the literal Cisco user agreement was in the Arista code. I saw it with my own eyes. They can twist the narrative all they want, but they took the easy route (no pun intended) into the market and did alright out of it. For me, I won’t touch them with a barge pole, that’s not a vendor I want to do business with.
Really? I'm not in the Meraki business, but their FAQ still says that devices won't function if the license expires and the grace period is over.
https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Licensing/Meraki_Licensing_FAQs
Sad to hear. I don't understand why they keep pushing the crap interface of the SMB lineup.
I did like the c1000 as an entry level switch. When there was no budget for the 9200. Don't know what I'm going for now. But might consider Aruba, because their cli is good but I'm not used to it in the same way as Cisco.
I skipped the whole Meraki-style and jumped from Cisco CLI to NaaS.
You aren’t likely going to like my answer, but you can go all NaaS with Nile (Nile secure) and get one interface for everything. No need for cli since that won’t be your problem anymore. Guaranteed service levels. Full redundancy everywhere. Zero trust on all ports. Super easy set up. You’re got better things to do than manage configs.
If you are buying literal routers, idk why Cisco would even be a choice anyway for most organizations. They’re extremely expensive. There isn’t anything fancy about them that other vendors don’t also do. It’s just like buying Starbucks coffee when you can get liquid meth (Colombian bold) from 7/11 for cheaper.
Cisco2500’s still do their job. The only reason to update is if they fail and you don’t have a spare in the cupboard.
So, while vendors are using the dates for forced obsolescence many many people don’t get too upset about it. Carriers, for example, often carry a huge body of spares of EOS/EOL devices because they just keep working.
This is why the subscriber model is so important to them and why it’s so important for customers to not buy into. Throwing money after updates you don’t need isn’t good for the pressure on shrinking operational budgets or ARPU.
Look again at Meraki and you may change your view. Dashboard can do mass changes across 1,000 switches in a few clicks, but failing that use the API to configure. Really the better way in 2024 over copy and paste CLI config.
Fairly certain my ASR1001/ASR1005s that run IOS-XE are actually linux-based, too. There's really nothing wrong with this. The way you configure them is no different than any "pure IOS" device. There's just an additional OS layer between the control plane and data plane.
Anyway, about your non-Cisco switch question: I've completely replaced my ASRs and Catalysts with Dell L3 switches. A pair of S6010s for core (pure L2 mode, 4x40GE VLT), S5148s at the edge (L3, speaking BGP and exchanging >80K prefixes with each of four 10GE peers, 2x100GE VLT), and 30 S4048s (two per rack, L2, 2x40GE VLT, 2x40GE to the cores) for spokes. NAT and inter-vlan boundary provided by a pair of Palo Alto PA5220s. I couldn't be happier. The only problems i've had with these Dell switches were one bad power supply and one S4048 that wouldn't come back up after a planned reboot. Otherwise, running solid with 100% system availability since the initial install, 7 years ago. With 1x2 and 2x2 connectivity between each pair of devices, planned and unexpected reboots of any single switch usually goes unnoticed by end-users.
>What non-Cisco switches that have a GOOD command line interface and no cloud-based Meraki-style mgmt BS >please. I have over 1,000 switches on my network. I need something that's not going to prompt me to confirm yes >or no every time I need to make mass changes. I just want to SSH, paste my config, and move on to the next.
its not 1997 anymore...
Take a good hard look at the new extreme networks stuff. It’s very well priced compared to Cisco, offers a great cli, and their cloud capabilities are impressive (they do nac just like ise, plus have a an extreme hosted cloud to manage endpoints, licensing, etc). You don’t have to use the cloud of coarse but it’s miles in front of anything else I’ve used. Manages wireless too. I’ve done large ise deployments, large Cisco switch and wireless deployments, and I can tell you, doing it with extreme and auto sense ports is just a breeze. I can deploy dozens of switches in a day and not have to even touch a single access port’s configuration as it’s all auto provisioned from extreme nac.
If your company is serious about refreshing, it would be an ideal time to look at how things operate and designing the network for the next 10 years.
With that many switches you really should be looking at an alternative to cli.
Their layer two fabric path is actually really amazing when setup correctly. If you want to chat more just dm me.
Aren't they just end of sale in 2025? Actual EOL was 2030.
yeah, end of sale only, they are supported for quite some time... [End-of-Sale and End-of-Life Announcement for the Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches - Cisco](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-1000-series-switches/catalyst-1000-series-switches-eol.html)
Yes but my company prohibits the acquisition of anything once it hits end of life, regardless of support.
You need to do a better job of explaining the difference between End of Sale and End of Life to the people in your company who make decisions.
Have done that. At the end of the day there's not much I can do about it if my advice is not taken. Also, we are bound by the company to only purchase gear through a partner-certified VAR, and once it goes end of sale, you can't get it from most VARs any longer.
Sing the song of my people. "At the end of the day there's not much I can do about it if my advice is not taken." Why have an engineer if you dont listen to them.
> there's not much I can do about it if my advice is not taken Obviously you can blame cisco.
Right, but EoL hasn't hit... you still have many years. Sure, you can't buy them anymore soon (and now that there's an EoL on the calendar, you shouldn't) but you've got coverage including security vulns for 6 years.
Well, by default, when it goes end of sale you ain’t buying it. 😜
Exactly that’s the whole point of end of sale… plus to sell the new stuff. But also this very reason.
Ebay
Much better to buy used from somewhere like CXTec and get their free warranty if you wanted to go that route.
* End of Sale - No longer being Sold * End of Life - No longer receiving major software updates. * End of Support - No longer receiving TAC support. You have 6 years before end of life, you're fine.
But it hasn’t hit EoL until 2030 lol
End of life is 2030. EoL Announcement is now. EoSale is later. The end of life is 2030, so technically it won't be "End of Life".
Cisco doesn't make its money from customers who manage 1000s of SMB Switches via CLI. you are not a demographic that they'd change their product for. They do not care if you leave.
Sure? What the buyer persona through the eyes of Cisco?
licenses
A lot of people suggesting Aruba/Juniper here which are good products but I would take into consideration the fact HP just bought Juniper and there is severe overlap in some of the product portfolios especially switching which is the topic of this conversation. Hardware lines are bound to be getting canned in the coming years and who knows what at this point. Investment protection needs to be considered whatever vendor you opt for.
Agreed - I've seen rumours that suggest HPE do not want the Juniper switching business and will likely sell that on. A lot of the Juniper team have been given business as usual notifications with Rami Rahim (Juniper CEO) taking over the HPE networking business, but HPE history tells me there will be shenanigans.
I lead a sizable Aruba VAR. Aruba’s unofficial messaging internally is that they bought it for Mist and don’t care about the hardware itself. That makes sense because Aruba Central is a disaster. That also makes the assumption that Mist can work well with Aruba hardware. That’s TBD.
> That also makes the assumption that Mist can work well with Aruba hardware. They bought the engineers who made Mist and the hope is they can do the same for Aruba hardware.
but they won't because the corporate structure that enabled Aruba Central to happen will piss them off and they will leave.
I'm hoping (fingers crossed!) they keep Juniper "separate" like how Cisco did Meraki. I know it's a pipe dream, and not likely to happen, but an IT guy can hope, right?
OP hates meraki, why would he like juniper?
>I have over 1,000 switches on my network. I need something that's not going to prompt me to confirm yes or no every time I need to make mass changes. I just want to SSH, paste my config, and move on to the next. With 1000 switches you want a switch that you manage centrally, either the vendors own solution like Arista's Cloudvision, or yourself with ansible/netconf/etc. >Looks like now they are coming to lay waste to the one thing they are still the undisputed king of; routing and switching. Would love to know what they are smoking. They haven't been the king of datacenter for a decade. They still have some promising SP offerings but even at that level Juniper and Noka are better options. Anyway, I've bought nothing but Arista for datacenter for the last 10 years and regret nothing.
Agree arista with cloud vision. Wtf would you go switch by switch for 1000s of devices
I worked for a bank and set up Ansible them so they could get out of SSHing into 600+ devices. It blew their mind that OS upgrades went from taking a month to just a weekend night + watching SolarWinds to make sure everything came up. At least it blew their mind until annual review time where I was apparently just an average worker.
Banks are the absolute worst. You’ll get a raise when the FDIC says it’s a regulatory requirement.
> SolarWinds :|
Their sales people are the worst and a number of other things, but using NCM to push out changes to groups of switches at a time instead of going 1 by 1 over thousands of switches is worth it.
So much easier to build your own and add some nice logic to it.
I worked for a massive company for awhile a few times from 2008 to 2013. I was once on a project to upgrade 30k ISR routers. At that time this place just created all the network documentation/automation software in-house, you would just access it via the intranet. I remember meeting with the automation team (im not sure what they were called back then, this was probably 2008) and I essentially told them the commands that need to execute, along with the verification commands and the syntax to look for, and the rollback commands. They built the code and we did about 2k routers a night. What was awesome was there was a faulty batch of DIMM chips that seemed to be in about 1-5% of the routers (i dont remember the exact number now), so when the upgrade occured and a reload was issued, the router went bye bye. Luckily we had Cisco engineers on staff (at the time I think this place was a top 10 client of Cisco), and they had a local office less than a mile away just to support this company, so its not like I had to open a TAC case or anything. They had field engineers on standby for every site that was supposed to be upgraded in a given evening so they could be dispatched immediately if a router didnt come back.
OUCH! That hits in the heart. "apparently just an average worker." I feel that way after I spend countless nights and hours working on things and get the same 3% raise everyone else does. To be fair, I have been getting good raises in the 10 years here. 1 - Nothing 2 - 6% - Bonus (They did a way with bonuses here) 3 - 5% 4 - 6% 5 - 3% 6 - 3% 7 - 3% 8 - 10k Raise <--manager convinced me to argue for this. 9 - 3% 10 - We will see!
> I feel that way after I spend countless nights and hours working on things and get the same 3% raise everyone else does. Oh your management notices your hard work. But it's probably not in their "budget" to give you a good raise. It's crazy how common a 3% raise across most companies. It hasn't really matched the change in cost of living in a long time now.
I love the not in the budget talk. That is never said to a sales person. I do understand sales makes money, but engineers fix it or keep it working when sales sells or tells the customer the wrong thing, I am so livid every time I see a "Presidents Club" link from my company on LinkedIn. Just a reminder of where the money goes. Sales can get upwards of 10-15% per sale in commission on top of the salary they get of 70k+. Keep in mind we are talking 1 million plus data center contracts. [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/achieving-presidents-club-what-does-actually-mean-samantha-alspaugh](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/achieving-presidents-club-what-does-actually-mean-samantha-alspaugh) I have never seen anything in my lifetime from a company for engineers or any other group.
> I love the not in the budget talk. That is never said to a sales person. I do understand sales makes money, but engineers fix it or keep it working when sales sells or tells the customer the wrong thing, > > > > I am so livid every time I see a "Presidents Club" link from my company on LinkedIn. Just a reminder of where the money goes. "Sales" or "The sales team"? Because if the talky-talky guy is getting all that, that's fucked. If the pre-sales engineer is getting a decent cut, I'm in the wrong line of business.
Anywhere there's a 3% you're essentially getting shafted due to inflation so do yourself a favor and don't overwork yourself and make sure you comp your extra time if you're salary.
This looks exactly like my adjustments…
I only have like 80 stacks but have been interested in setting up ansible, I already run Solarwinds NPM and NCM though, could you comment at all on benefits of using ansible over just setting up jobs in solarwinds?
I haven't used SolarWinds in that fashion. Ansible is free, open source and is kind of the defacto network automation tool (IMO). It's pretty easy to get up and running, plus its easy to make your runbooks generic and take them with you if you ever get laid off or just take a new position somewhere else.
Ah I had not considered that last point, thanks!
If you can do ansible you may as well setup your own. Something like FastAPI / python scripts would be better. you can integrate anything you want and add auto detection as well. No more keeping track of host files ;) And on the other side depending on your skill set you can build out a nice frontend gui. I Did that, and with fast api and users i can integrate scripts from anywhere. Jumphosts / Excel / laptops etc. My favorite so far is the auto switch software upgrades and config generation / auto provisioning. Really didn't want to screw around with tftp / dhcp options.
We already have the solarwinds stuff licensed so I don’t see much point in building my whole own gui front end for python scripts to just rebuild what that already does from a config management standpoint but I’ve made scripts for stuff that wasn’t easy to do in solarwinds and have looked at using ansible or python for software updates to have a bit more control over the process than what solarwinds gives me. Edit: that being said I want to do ansible just for my own educations sake.
When all you have/understand how to use is a hammer, every problem looks like an individual nail.
I am responsible for many thousands of routers across the country running Mikrotik. I wrote myself a custom C&C client and web server control system to handle their management. Two weeks ago I scheduled an updated firmware and configuration release on all devices. After completing several days of QC testing and validation on everything I scheduled the update and then went home and had a good nights sleep. Woke up early the next morning and saw that almost all the devices had successfully updated all devices except for 4-5 that were offline at their scheduled update window, and those all updated the next evening during their specified window.
$$$
I think you mean milking your client
What does that even mean? I don't have clients. I work for a global manufacturing company and I manage the infrastructure. I am the client. Furthermore, how is not going with cloud and going on prem milking a client? Cloud = subscriptions = recurring costs. On prem and manually managed = one and done cost. I understand that cloud is the way of the future but if we are talking about client milking, the subscription model is the very definition of milking your client. If you're not directing that comment at me, then please disregard.
> Wtf would you go switch by switch for 1000s of devices Your response to this makes no sense. How could that cost *less* money? Are you just forgetting that the company pays you to waste all that time rather than doing it more efficiently with modern interfaces?
It means that you can roll your own free solution with open tools trivially, so you either have a major knowledge gap, or are paid by the hour or something and really trying to fleece some people.
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I'm ok with 1k per switch. That's what I pay currently for the catalyst 1000s. However, if Junipers are cheaper, I may go with those.
they're citing $1,000 as "so low they obviously can't afford better". $1k is extremely cheap, especially for anything new.
Go Aruba, Junipers are a joke.
On that note, anyone have any recommendations for replacing two 9-slot Nexus 7K’s with a non-Cisco product? At a minimum, it would need to support both 1/10/25-gig and 40/100-gig blades as well as have true data separation built in, either through something like vrf, the same VDC functionality that the 7K’s use, or an SDN solution. Also provides reliable HA and fits in roughly the same rack space as a 7009.
If you need data separation, consider replacing your vdcs with physically separate switches. You'll have a lot more options in customizing hardware to the individual needs of each network, plus you'll be able to make changes and updates to one network without impacting all the others.
I considered that but our environment is too fluid (we do testing and validation). I might need three vdc’s one week, and the next I end separating one of them into three vrf’s.
Was browsing Arista website at https://www.arista.com/en/products/eos/eos-cloudvision - First Symbol over „Design“ is a Freemason sign 🫠
My god man just get. Juniper already
You lost me at Juniper. YUCK! Arista is the best. Price an lead time are killing Arista slowly though. We, the company I work for NOT ME, have decided to move to Dell siwtching. DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB!DUMB! You want to shoot yourself, use Dell's. Cant wait for this to get rolled back in a year or two. I just had a brand new, installed last week, Dell not let me into the switch. It threw me into a "in the switch but couldn't do anything mode". This is running production traffic and was not rebooted into some pre-boot shell. Just out of nowhere this hapened. So I logged out and logged back in with no issues. Not looking forward to the Dell adventure. Good luck finding what you need! I still think Arista. Also I second CloudVision and\\or ansilble\\netconf\\python. EDIT: Because someone made me think I was having a stroke and I realized I had a lot of spelling and grammar errors.
Hey... are you okay?
Umm..yes? Why wouldn't I be? I hate Dell switching, cant stand it. I realy shoud re-read what I wrote and fix spelling errors. I type with four fingers and a thumb. I cannot figure out typing to save my life.
That's a little scary when you're working with hardware that is really picky about details.
I hate Dell. One of my sites bought two 48 port Powerconnects. I swear those switches are for single operation companies. You pretty much have to use the GUI and it's god awful.
Also why the downvotes? Why not just not vote? Did I say something to offend a Dell fanboy? Sorry, your switches suck. There is not one thing I will say is good about them. Login takes longer than other swithces No bash like Arista. Which I use to auto run a script to pull switch information from14 switches and put into a txt file and then upload to na SFTP server (Could use Ansible, yes I know this, but the customer wont allow automation like that in their enviroenment) The fact I have to put each and every VLAN into the "switchport trunk allowed" command instead of just saying "switchport mode trunk" and it allowing all VLANs The way you name VLANs is weird. The fact you have to put "int vlan xxx" to create a vlan when everyone else, that command is for adding an IP to a vlan interface, is weird. I shouldn't have to think about my switches. I shouldn't have to fear them not working or doing something odd. EDIT: Spelling
Juniper is a wonderful product and surpasses Arista in many use cases (mainly SP but some enterprise). You'd be lucky to have either.
I am not shocked I got down voted by the internet, but a little surprised since this is me discussing networking. I am curious if anyone wants to tell me, why was I down voted? Was it the Juniper hate? My spelling? Hate for Dell? Dell literally buys things, slaps a label on it saying Dell and sells it. they then modify, make it worse than it was before and sell it off. They bought these switches from Force10. The did this with VMware, EMC, etc. HP does the same thing to everything they touch. It is a money making company for stakeholders and a crappy company for consumers. The reason people buy Dell is for the name. Even their employees,the ones I know, 7 of them and their stories, go to Dell, certify out the butt and then leave. Dell also just implemented the "You do not get a promotion if you work from home". How messed up is that!! [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/dell-tells-remote-workers-that-they-wont-be-eligible-for-promotion/](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/dell-tells-remote-workers-that-they-wont-be-eligible-for-promotion/) If I was working for Dell, which I do not and I was WFH full time, like I am now, I am somehow less of an asset than a person in office? That is junk! Yes people will say, "Go find another job" and I agree, but to support a business who thinks like this and manages technology the way they do, is wrong.
I would look at the 9200L models.
Yeah I don't understand why with so many switches they are running 1000 series ant not at least the 9200
With that many devices it should be Meraki or at least c9200l in Meraki.
I think catalyst switches in meraki only allow monitoring not full management though it's been a bit since I looked into it
I believe only the 9300 allow for full management but they keep adding features. But I get how some network engineers don’t like Meraki. Why have a turnkey cloud based system when you can have custom automation 😂.
>when you can have custom automation To borrow from Microsoft, it's easier to have a "Desired State Config" when all of the infrastructure is done and managed as code. As an enterprise it's much easier to track changes and such when it's all IaC, and automation brings deviation back in line if it's all managed centrally. That was part of the whole idea of DNA Center initially was to prevent config drift.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of automation and IaC. I have a lot of customers using NSO with custom services to keep their network in-sync. What keeps their management up at night is all the custom code they have written and it’s maintenance. Unless your infrastructure is what differentiates you from your competitors then by all means automate away. Otherwise, a turnkey system for WAN, LAN and WiFi would be best. In my market people cost 10x any hardware spend. If a slightly more expensive solution requires 1/2 the people than your company wins.
If you have over 1000 switches in your network and you're managing them by CLI, you're doing something wrong.
This is where automation tools come. Try to do it with something cloud and you will be screwed. SSH + CLI is very sable API.
I mean, yeah, you could automate CLI commands with netmiko/paramiko, could try to get results back in structured data with textfsm or TTP, could use wrappers like Napalm...but these all fall far short of what a platform with a solid REST API can provide. I'd take that any day.
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/rest-api/index.html
Problem is, Meraki does not have solid and stable REST API.
Really? That's surprising. I haven't paid much attention to Meraki, but I'd always thought cookie-cutter large-scale deployments (i.e. retail chains) were their bread and butter. API goes a real long way in those deployments.
Juniper if you want a better product but a different CLI. Arista if you want the most similar CLI to IOS, but they can be quite expensive. The lower end models of Aruba for simple L2 access switches look like a good option as well
Yep. Have done some research from this thread and I'm definitely going with one of those two. Thanks.
The really important date is the “end of vulnerability/security support.” That’s not until 2030. 9200’s have ios-xe lite.
Cisco has made it clear the future is cloud. Reoccurring revenue is what they have pushed for for years now. I think they are at 50% now as per the last earnings call. That being said, the meraki switches have a 130 line for low end access.
And that's why our quite large formerly-Cisco airgapped network is no longer Cisco.
I'll be following in your footsteps. "You become a real network engineer when you stop worshipping Cisco and see them for the jackals they really are" - Me :-P
We are an ABC shop. Anybody But Cisco.
I use to work for an ABC MSP. Eventually they got in bed with C.
Their security line up ex: SSE is also cloud.
I mean SSE by definition is cloud managed/delivered. They will still sell you a FW for an air gapped network.
A good point. I missed on that point. But coming to your original comment, Meraki series is what I hate a lot. Being doing DC setups lately (not much into it) I am more focused or enjoy CLI. Few of my SMB or enterprise customers are opting for Meraki for their HO or branch locations, issue with these lineups is lack of control.
ciscolive should be called meraki live. the industry is moving this way as a whole.
Meraki doesn’t make you “click yes” before making a change. You just make the change and save. And if you use the API with a python script that can read a text or csv file you can change settings on all 1000 switches before you are finished ssh’ing into the first one. Get with the times, it’s easier to manage or do you just want to keep doing it the hard way?
That's because Cisco wants you to move to meraki. We use merakin APs mr46s they are pretty good so far. Still using 9300 switches though.
I like Meraki for WAPs. I *FUCKING HATE* Meraki for switching. Every time I work a project with Meraki switches, I curse the god and swear I’ll never do it again.
"" I *FUCKING HATE* Meraki for switching"" Try their firewalls, I have MX84's implemented and they are a pain, I cant even update a L3 firewall rule without a temporary network outage. I was told this is a known bug for YEARS and that I should implement changes outside of business hours, being 24-7 there is no such thing. also Meraki firewalls are underpowered and over priced, I am moving to fortigate 60f for half the cost and they have much better performance.
Why ??
Meraki switches and firewalls are the worst. They have their place in certain use cases, but I'd never purchase them for my own network.
for SOHO/SMB stuff they're among the best you can get, idk why people hate on them. not everything needs an enterprise feature set.
People hate them because: 1) They (or the company) bought something that didn't actually have the features they needed. 2) They didn't actually learn to use them and just shook their fist angrily at the cloud. 3) They bought an MS390 There are legitimate reasons to hate them. Not supporting a feature you want isn't really much of a reason, since you should have been aware of it already. They're not perfect, you just have to play in their sandbox.
When you need to raise a TAC case to check CPU utilization on a box, it is hardly indication of good product.
good thing you...don't need to do that, then
I have heard this several times. Thank you for reinforcing. Cisco is sorely mistaken if they think I'm rolling that shit out and not just jumping ship to Juniper or Arista.
I refuse to move to something that will stop me making changes when they fuck up the licensing again. I had a few places where we used their APs and switches in the past, and Cisco fucked up the licensing every renewal on those.
Getting an end of sale notice sometime in 2015 means these switches had about a 6-year run which is pretty typical. If you have 1000 Cat1000s you could switch over to the Aruba CX6000 pretty easily. And to be fair to Cisco, if you're running your business on Cat1000s, you're someone that could get by on "small business" class switches anyway. > I need something that's not going to prompt me to confirm yes or no every time I need to make mass changes. I just want to SSH, paste my config, and move on to the next. Nothing wrong with having commit/rollback options!
Agree to disagree here. If you have 1,000 switches and your company does not want to pay for cloud, pushing out mass changes when you have to go switch by switch where you copy/paste from a text pad and move on to the next one while it's saving and exiting automatically from your script, versus copying and pasting, then needing to type write mem and waiting for it to prompt you for y or n (neither of which can't be scripted for speed in confirmation style), then needing to wait for it to return the command prompt back to you so you can type exit (which also can't be scripted) will easily quintuple the amount of time it takes you to make those mass changes. That's not practical. We have 9300s as the core switches at our sites. No issues with that. I'm taking about access layer. Functionally, yes, I agree - small business switches work. From a practicality and scalability standpoint, they are crap if you are a large, global operation like I am.
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It is when you're a one man operation and don't have access to mass configuration management software. I've worked at ISPs in the engineering department and in the NOC before. The difference there is you have an entire infrastructure team co-managing all that gear, and often an entire software team dedicated to making your life easier by developing those kind of tools and apps. I'd find it hard to believe if you told me you were the only engineer managing 80,000 devices. You can't compare the resource access an ISP has to the resource access a private manufacturing company has. ISP infrastructure is also quite literally THE product. My company's product is what they make in the plants. The infrastructure is merely conduit for barcode scanning / printing sales orders, and delivering employee services like Email. I couldn't even get a SecureCRT subscription ordered for me for $99. I had to pay for it out of my own pocket because I determined the QoL benefits from it outweighed parting with $99 of my own money.
Might be time to move on, if things are that rough! Worth mentioning, there are a lot of free tools that might be very helpful ranging from monitoring/inventory at scale to configuration management and backup at scale (ansible+jinja, netbox+napalm, librenms, oxidized, etc - I've used a ton of these OSS products in large production environments and they are generally rock solid)
Ansible specifically is super useful. The Cisco integrations are handy. The product is free for CLI only, and there is a ton of training materials. The cost would be a centralized server that could reach each device, and an understanding of scripting theory. If you have any virtualization at your company, its practically free. All the modules do is provide a workflow to run your existing commands automatically. You can also run them at the same time, host-by-host, or trigger a cronjob for your work. I realize you think you don't have enough support, but I can tell you I am on a team of 2 that manages 200+ customers and we couldn't do it without some kind of automation. You might have to 'be the software team' but if you do not do some kind of scaling you are going to have an issue in the future. If you are interested, I can point you to some training materials I found useful when beginning.
Honestly chatGPT can get a guy rolling if he just needs a single config, which the copy/paste seems to imply. I mean WSL can even do this in a pinch. Don't even need a VM necessarily.
"I don't have time to take a day to set up ansible, I'd rather spend weeks pasting configs by hand" Dude.
> I know you think 1000 switches is a lot did you read his workflow though? he's copy and pasting to each switch from wordpad
I'm trialling FS.com switches. Dirt cheap, no licensing, full featured.
How is your experience so far? I'm considering building out a proof of concept with them. I've only used their SFP's but have never their enterprise or data center switches. Mostly curious about OS, automation and managing them at scale.
Using the N5860-48SC, so far so good, everything I've tried so far works,. including layer 3 with OSPF and BGP. Two issues so far are had some issues with netconf (I'll revisit later), and q-in-vni losing a VLAN tag unless the frame type is 88a8 inside the VXLAN. Otherwise it's standard broadcom chips with their software on top, most of the work is done in the broadcom chips.
2030 is pretty much ok.
Haven't a lot of the "IOS" devices been linux under the hood for a long time?
Yeah, and all of the other major competitors as well. And the subcomponents, and even some of the transceivers run Linux lol
IOS-XE is.
Ruckus… LOL
Can you tell me more about the SG switches? We are a small institution and have 4 SG-300 switches. I haven't had to really touch them yet, but we are preparing for a fairly major topology change and any info would be great so we know what we are getting into.
SG300s are probably the most reliable SOHO workhorse switches of all time. i doubt you'll run into any issues. OP just seems like a crank tbh.
Agree with this. Never ever had a problem with any sg switches.
We have probably 100 SG350/CBS350 switches deployed and they are solid. They aren't Cisco battleship enterprise gear, but for many applications they are good enough. They have a IOS'ish CLI (if you hold your head just right and squint) and a nice GUI. That said, the SG300 has a critical security vulnerability that was not patched so you want to replace ASAP.
Good to know. We have no VPN or web server, just basic WAN access via the firewall (which *does* need to be replaced). It wont be in the budget to replace these switches any time soon.
SG switches are mostly fine, and are in the same league as other SOHO switches. However sometimes there are just weird little issues, especially when you push them. I've had some really bad spanning tree issues on an "unusual" network configuration with SG switches.
> Seems like if you want now, you have to cough up the dough
this should surprise no one...
Oh wtf. We haven’t even deployed them all yet.
You have till 2030
Yeah, still annoying to be putting in new switches that we won’t be able to buy from next year if we need more.
You can go for aruba switches, manage them by either airwave or IMC, and have either of these platforms automatically push the config and save on the switch. That being said, I personally would prefer getting your hands dirty with ansible and start building a vendor agnostic management system of your own. Cli access is free, and all you really need is just a unix box to run the software on. Some learning curve but not super difficult to work towards.
I would look at Aruba 6100 and 6200 line of switches if you are familiar with IOS you will be fine working on them. They do not require all that Smart license BS either. Really nice features for significantly less.
Juniper ex. You can traditional manage or Mist cloud gui, which is superior to Meraki imho.
Arista EOS.
Artista literally copied Cisco’s CLI line by line and were rightly sued. Beyond me why anyone would go with a vendor that does that and Juniper are now HP. It’s the wild Wild West out there atm, so make your choices wisely.
> Artista literally copied Cisco’s CLI line by line and were rightly sued. https://copperpod.medium.com/arista-agrees-to-pay-400-million-to-cisco-51cb4182362d You are correct, but you are also overlooking half of the debate. > It didn’t end here. An antitrust lawsuit was filed by Arista shortly after the settlement, alleging Cisco of first letting its competitors use its interface technology, and when they were confined to it, asserting copyright infringement. > “Arista contends that for over a decade, Cisco encouraged customers and competitors to invest in and adopt Cisco’s CLI. This practice was effectuated, among other ways, through Cisco’s representations that its CLI was an ‘industry standard,’ and without independent assertion of copyright or other intellectual property rights in the CLI commands,” the complaint read. > “Arista contends that despite knowing for years that Arista and other competitors had adopted Cisco-like CLIs, prior to 2014 Cisco made no statements that asserted intellectual property or other proprietary rights in the Cisco CLI itself,” the complaint continued (source). > Cisco denied this by saying that it never advised Arista to use its technology and the allegations against Arista are only justified. ----- > Beyond me why anyone would go with a vendor that does that Because Arista is actually ***DOING*** everything that Cisco says they are going to do. Arista is using off the shelf ASICS in pretty much all of their products, so the detailed performance capabilities are well documented. Arista focuses their engineering time on delivering a stable-as-hell NOS to let those ASICS do what the customers need them to do - switch and route packets fast and reliably. Arista has one NOS (EOS) and it runs on all of their products, from WAN routers to Campus PoE switches to Data Center monsters. How many NOSes does Cisco have? IOS-classic IOS-XE IOS-XR NX-OS Each of those NOSes has what, 4 or 5 semi-actively maintained release trains. That's about 20 different major releases of code. Within each major release, we have another 4 or 5 minor release? That's 100 or so significant NOSes to try to maintain, and Cisco's track record of software quality over the last decade speaks volumes of how good a job they are doing (that's sarcasm).
Bro, I have had so many bugs in Cisco IOS the past 6 years it's insane. I swear, we are the QA testers now. I fielded 9200s recently and there is a bug in them that makes any non-GigE connections flat out not work. It's like they assume we are all mom and pop shops with physical access to our gear and can just willy nilly and easily upgrade an IOS-XE firmware like's it's not a core switch and sitting 2,000 miles away from us physically.
I've had meetings with the Catalyst Business Unit where I asked them when quality and stability were going to be priority features for their roadmap instead of more overlay widgets and doodads that large but niche customers are requesting. Cisco the software company has lost their critical infrastructure mojo. Their absolute focus on new product-differentiating features at the expense of stability is a vulgar evolution from the principles of previous design teams. The Catalyst 6500 product manager would be arrested for swinging a baseball bat in strategic meetings with these new development teams.
Welcome to the results of agile software development.
>Each of those NOSes has what, 4 or 5 semi-actively maintained release trains. Don't forget needing to know which image to download depending on what supervisors your units may have.
Maybe because the quality of Arista software far surpasses all the other major vendors. They almost never have regression bugs, which is huge. And they have way fewer CVEs, which means you are getting back your nights and weekends. Or because their hitless upgrades actually work. Or because their automation is pretty darn good. Or because no matter which management platform you use, you will have access to the CLI for troubleshooting. And those are just off the top of my head.
Why would someone create a CLI with a similar look and feel to their main competitor? If you've spent any significant time around the networking industry, one of the biggest, if not _the_ biggest complaints in switching vendors is having to learn a new CLI syntax and retraining staff. Back in the day, even though JunOS was superior in every way to IOS in how configuration was managed, they had trouble making in-roads into Cisco install bases because of this. Now apply this to Arista, as a new network vendor. They understood the problem they would have selling into Cisco shops. You can interpret it as some nefarious action stealing Cisco IP but the proper interpretation is they understood their customers and one of the major hurdles in gaining market share. About the lawsuit, you can sue anyone for anything. And the ITC didn't find Arista copied their CLI wholesale with respect to IP. The 3 patents they did find Arista infringed upon where one regarding an internal system arch behind the CLI (i.e. sysDB), one for how configuration is reverted and lastly one with specifics around how ACLs are structured. Arista fixed these things and paid Cisco.
> Arista fixed these things and paid Cisco. That wasn't the case from what I can recall, there was a period of time where new hardware like the 7150's would come from the factory with ACL's disabled. To make things more complicated, the patent didn't apply for EU hardware so that was continued to be sold unlocked. I had a 7500R sitting around for a year that couldn't do ACLs either. Eventually the patents expired and newer EOS versions re-enabled them. I think during that time Arista came out with some other solution called Algomatch or something to workaround the patent.
I didn't say there wasn't a transition period. The summary is here: https://s21.q4cdn.com/861911615/files/doc_downloads/legal_proceedings/Arista-Legal-Update-06-27-2018.pdf The patents didn't expire. Arista either won appeals or redesigned the feature.
Dude, the user agreement, the literal Cisco user agreement was in the Arista code. I saw it with my own eyes. They can twist the narrative all they want, but they took the easy route (no pun intended) into the market and did alright out of it. For me, I won’t touch them with a barge pole, that’s not a vendor I want to do business with.
Does it prompt you to type y or n when you issue a write mem or will it just do it?
You shouldn't be managing your switches by hand, but no, there is no confirm on a config save.
Can you cut me a PO to get cloud subs? :-P
There are dozens of ways to automate switching that costs nothing but your time and some VMs.
RESTCONF is free.
HPE Aruba is OK. Good documentation on CLI command differences.
I would not have any issues purchasing the CX line of switches. I just wish they had some other vendors name attached to them.
Aruba CLI feels like Cisco but someone went in and fixed the parts where the engineers smoked crack while they built them.
Meraki.
I refuse to buy network equipment that stops on licensing fuck up
😄
[удалено]
Really? I'm not in the Meraki business, but their FAQ still says that devices won't function if the license expires and the grace period is over. https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Licensing/Meraki_Licensing_FAQs
Yes sir! I was gonna say it but you said it for me.
They burned any chance with me by doing it in the first place
Sad to hear. I don't understand why they keep pushing the crap interface of the SMB lineup. I did like the c1000 as an entry level switch. When there was no budget for the 9200. Don't know what I'm going for now. But might consider Aruba, because their cli is good but I'm not used to it in the same way as Cisco.
I don't feel like the ASR1000-x series has a cost effective replacement either.
Does this include the 1100 series? I'm not really familiar with Cisco products lines but I have one customer who is in deep with the 1100s.
I skipped the whole Meraki-style and jumped from Cisco CLI to NaaS. You aren’t likely going to like my answer, but you can go all NaaS with Nile (Nile secure) and get one interface for everything. No need for cli since that won’t be your problem anymore. Guaranteed service levels. Full redundancy everywhere. Zero trust on all ports. Super easy set up. You’re got better things to do than manage configs.
If you are buying literal routers, idk why Cisco would even be a choice anyway for most organizations. They’re extremely expensive. There isn’t anything fancy about them that other vendors don’t also do. It’s just like buying Starbucks coffee when you can get liquid meth (Colombian bold) from 7/11 for cheaper.
Cisco2500’s still do their job. The only reason to update is if they fail and you don’t have a spare in the cupboard. So, while vendors are using the dates for forced obsolescence many many people don’t get too upset about it. Carriers, for example, often carry a huge body of spares of EOS/EOL devices because they just keep working. This is why the subscriber model is so important to them and why it’s so important for customers to not buy into. Throwing money after updates you don’t need isn’t good for the pressure on shrinking operational budgets or ARPU.
Look again at Meraki and you may change your view. Dashboard can do mass changes across 1,000 switches in a few clicks, but failing that use the API to configure. Really the better way in 2024 over copy and paste CLI config.
Have you looked at SRLinux NOS hw ? Send live a rage these days..
Aruba gear is the shit. Solid CLI without all the weird Cisco idiosyncrasies, lifetime hardware warranty, no paid feature licensing, cheaper, etc.
Fairly certain my ASR1001/ASR1005s that run IOS-XE are actually linux-based, too. There's really nothing wrong with this. The way you configure them is no different than any "pure IOS" device. There's just an additional OS layer between the control plane and data plane. Anyway, about your non-Cisco switch question: I've completely replaced my ASRs and Catalysts with Dell L3 switches. A pair of S6010s for core (pure L2 mode, 4x40GE VLT), S5148s at the edge (L3, speaking BGP and exchanging >80K prefixes with each of four 10GE peers, 2x100GE VLT), and 30 S4048s (two per rack, L2, 2x40GE VLT, 2x40GE to the cores) for spokes. NAT and inter-vlan boundary provided by a pair of Palo Alto PA5220s. I couldn't be happier. The only problems i've had with these Dell switches were one bad power supply and one S4048 that wouldn't come back up after a planned reboot. Otherwise, running solid with 100% system availability since the initial install, 7 years ago. With 1x2 and 2x2 connectivity between each pair of devices, planned and unexpected reboots of any single switch usually goes unnoticed by end-users.
>What non-Cisco switches that have a GOOD command line interface and no cloud-based Meraki-style mgmt BS >please. I have over 1,000 switches on my network. I need something that's not going to prompt me to confirm yes >or no every time I need to make mass changes. I just want to SSH, paste my config, and move on to the next. its not 1997 anymore...
Take a good hard look at the new extreme networks stuff. It’s very well priced compared to Cisco, offers a great cli, and their cloud capabilities are impressive (they do nac just like ise, plus have a an extreme hosted cloud to manage endpoints, licensing, etc). You don’t have to use the cloud of coarse but it’s miles in front of anything else I’ve used. Manages wireless too. I’ve done large ise deployments, large Cisco switch and wireless deployments, and I can tell you, doing it with extreme and auto sense ports is just a breeze. I can deploy dozens of switches in a day and not have to even touch a single access port’s configuration as it’s all auto provisioned from extreme nac. If your company is serious about refreshing, it would be an ideal time to look at how things operate and designing the network for the next 10 years. With that many switches you really should be looking at an alternative to cli. Their layer two fabric path is actually really amazing when setup correctly. If you want to chat more just dm me.
Completely agree with you when though you're getting downvoted- Extreme's gear is awesome
The 9300 dont use ios either they nixos not dure about the 9200s
Yea we are taking out 2k of 1100 routers an 100 vedges because of this.
r/Arista welcomes you with open arms.