When my Cisco 3750 finally died, I was bummed out but looking for a replacement.  No sense in crying about my loss, or trying to decide IF I’m going to replace my switch since, my whole lab would be kind of useless without it.

My requirements for a new switch were pretty simple.

• Layer 3 Routing Capabilities
• 24 Gigabit Ports or better
• Cheap

The HP v1910-24G (JE006A) seemed to meet my requirements so I ordered it from Amazon when I saw that it was under $300.  I needed to get it in my lab fast, so I quickly made the purchase but I’ll admit I was skeptical.  Timothy Carr eased my mind a bit when he tweeted me.

Tim was right.  It not only met my expectations but exceeded them.

The Good

OK, the best thing about this switch was that it was cheap inexpensive.  At less than $300 this switch was really a steal for a home lab.  Try to find yourself another Layer 3 with the capabilities of this one for a better price.  Obviously, I’m going to put my other two requirements as Pros for this switch as well since that’s what I felt was important.

This switch had several capabilities that are pretty cool for an inexpensive home lab switch such as support for Link Level Discover Protocol (LLDP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), Link Aggregation, Quality of Service (QOS), stacking and IPv6 support.  Pretty neat that I can now play with all this stuff for my vSphere environment.

On top of some of the cool networking you can do with this switch, some additional items are available for security.  The switch supports 802.1X (Port based Network Access Control) allowing me to set rules for what kinds of machines can connect to the network.  In addition we can use Authentication Authorization and Accounting (AAA) and RADIUS.  Yes, the switch does have a local user database as you would expect.

The Bad

The biggest gripe I have about this switch is the lack of command line access.  This switch was meant to be configured via the built in web interface, so the default command line has a bit left to be desired. I found an unsupported solution to this that I wrote in a previous article.  Even after the CLI modification, you’re still running a version of Comware which is sturdy, but I imagine most people are used to the Cisco or Provision syntax and not Comware OS.

Also, this is not a true Layer 3 switch.  It supports up to 32 static routes which is great for a lab,but for a production environment you may want more than 32 or possibly some routing protocols that this switch lacks.

Hollow Points

 I am over the moon, happy with this switch.  While this might not be your core switch at your production datacenter, it is an amazing little switch for smaller workloads, especially a lab environment.