Replacing old 3750Es...

[deanwebb]

Lab at work is getting some serious refreshing. We'd like to have a Red Zone where we test cybersecurity evils and a Clean Zone where we can host staging environments for customers testing OEM offerings. For the Clean Zone, we will have VM hosts with VSAN storage, so we need 10Gb ports there - we will have 4 hosts and would like HA redundancy for the switches. We may also have call for copper lines, but we right now have more call for the fiber than the copper in that environment.

In the Red Zone, it's all copper and we have less than 48 hosts at present, but could expand that if we add in additional physical boxes for this or that use case. We don't need hardware redundancy there, as it's just there for "Break Me" boxes and no customer/OEM functions.

So what would all y'all recommend for replacing the 3750Es currently running the lab environment? Would Nexus 9300 be good for the fiber needs and Cat 9300 be good for the copper? Could we do better with other gear? We currently have no vendor lock-in.

[Otanx]

Based on your current switch being 3750Es I am assuming you are going to keep the hardware for awhile. I am drinking the Arista kool-aid these days, and would go with Arista 7050SX3-48YC8. Gives you 48x 1G/10G/25G SFP ports, and 8x 40G/100G uplinks. That way you can do 25G in the future, and even a little bit of 100G. Should give a good long life. The downside is they will not link at 100M if you need to go that slow.

I am not as familiar with the lower speed stuff. A quick look I think the 722XPM-48ZY8 would be my choice. 48 RJ-45 that can do 100M up to 2.5G (does not do 10M). Then 8x 25G uplinks. Again gives you some future proofing by doing 2.5G if you care about that.

-Otanx

[deanwebb]

Great info, thanks. I was wanting to consider Arista, but didn't know where to start. And Google returns Cisco-only responses to "replace 3750", wondering who bought up all the SEO there...