If there is anyone I trust about SMB product reviews (and of course everything else he talks about), it's Tom! Great to see your video! I'm glad that it wasn't' the same experience as you had with the Dashboard! And thank you for going the extra mile to properly test things like you always do.
I recently moved my home network over to these switches and I've been very impressed. I can't say I spotted the pausing on the web interface although I only briefly tried it - I bought these switches particularly for the CLI (since many other similarly priced options were web UI only) and ended up taking each switch out the box, using a serial cable to enable SSH/telnet and disable the web UI then performed the rest of the configuration over the CLI. It's definitely not IOS but it's still pretty flexible and easy to get used to - I'd previously noted down all of my previous switch port configuration files in a spreadsheet and was able to easily generate CLI config from this. I'd view it similarly to moving from Cisco IOS to another brand of CLI managed switch - it's not IOS, but it's not bad at at all!
Where I work, we find it is easier to manage our Enterprise Cisco Catalyst switches via console than to deal with the dashboard. For monitoring, we use Solarwinds and it has been working well for the last 7-8 years now
Had a nightmare experience stacking two of the 350X's with an NGP. Adding the NGP broke the existing stack and had to be rebuilt; every couple of days, the stack would be unresponsive via its IP address, updating to cisco's recommended firmware didn't fix it and after a factory reset of all of the switches, both the NGP and one of the 350X's just refused to boot. 🙃Ended up RMA'ing it and no problems after, but it definitely shaved a few years off of my life trying to fix it.
I just a regular person and I bought a SG300-10 10-Port Gigabit Managed Switch five years ago for $132 that I use with my pfSense router and OpenWRT AP. The GUI on switch is much better than what you just showed me and still going strong aside from it no longer being updated. Setting up the vLans seemed to be more involved too. In the near future, I will be looking for a new switch with POE. Thanks for you short review on these.
i have 20+ switches of 350 series, with Cisco Business Dashboard (25 device free) working for past 2 years, dam stable, but one thing u need to keep in mind to update the firmware in regular interval..... i love these switches with combination with CBD
I got a Cisco CBS350-24T-4X-EU since 2022-11 mainly as my layer-3 core switch (IPv4 and IPv6) at home in combination with my Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch ES-16-XG (used as layer-2 core switch) and I am quite happy with it as it was indeed affordable considering it's a Cisco device. No special licenses or service contracts required, not even for firmware updates.. The web interface is very slow. The CLI is not identucal to known Catalyst switches but many commands will work. SNMP now supports ISO OIDs for mac address scanning instead of Cisco specific OIDs. I rather like that.
@@balla2172😂😂😂😂😂 yea the way the treat EOL products is also insane😂😂😂 the license to use IOS is not transferable, that means if you’ve brought used Cisco product, you will need to relicense to use it legally. If your product is EOL, sorry we can’t fix it even you wish to pay. I’m so sad that I need to trash my 3750-E for this stupid reason. I just hope one day I might be able to get it up and running legally.
I feel like these are the evolution of the Linksys SRW product line that Cisco then moved over to the SG line. Cisco added some Cisco features like CDP & a IOS like CLI to them but it wasn't quite the same. It's a product line that I hadn't had great experience with in the past so I've kind of avoided it.
Been looking into cisco small business switches for some time now. It would be interesting to see a video /series on switches for home lab or enthuhiast level for 10 gig in 2023. 😊
Thanks for doing this video Tom! I was looking for a future replacement for my Cisco SG250-08HP Switch and I was having trouble finding a current up-to-date version of their locally managed switches with POE+. I am trying to avoid using my USW-Lite-8 switch from UI as a main/core switch but instead as a backup/extension only. Thanks again! :)
I've got a few dozen of the previous version of these(SG300) out there and for the most part they've been rock solid, and the CLI is decent enough. Some of them are probably 9 or 10 years old by now and I think I've had 1 case of having to replace one with a hardware issue? I've replaced a couple with the CBS350s last year and noticed the same thing with the web UI, luckily just needed to get in long enough to enable SSH. They're definitely decent small/medium business switches.
I've used the SG500-24 and -48. Also used the SG350-10, -24, -48 I personal didn't enjoy the SG500 series. Has fans fail on them all the time. Yes I was able to get them exchanged but when you having to replace the replacement after 1 yr use, it's not fun. Never had any issues with the SG350 series. Interface on both can be slow or painful slow at times, depending on what you are doing.
Great video Tom. we bought a number of the CBS switches and apart from being fairly reliable we found the release quite dissapointing from the slowness of the gui which hasnt really improved since the sg300 days and concept that someone at cisco decided to change the mounting position of the rack ears so the unit sticks out the front of everything else has been a massive head shaker for us. We have spent many hours on the dashboard trying to get it to work properly which did connect and do things but seemed quite flawed with many issues that got us asking why would a company like Cisco even release such a product. Holding our breath that a future fix might fix all of these issues. yay! :) p.s. the position (under the port where you cant see it?) of the port LED indicators is another conversation I would love to have with them. who made that decision and are they fired yet? :)
Hey Tom is it possible to do a review of different managed switches here in 2023 and give some of your recommendations? Something that would fit good for Homelabs and Small Businesses.
Maybe you have a network issue. Spanning tree is your friend in multiple switch setups. You can use portfast with clients but not recommended with switches. I do not have the slow issue you are seeing on the cbs350 switches in the GUI nor do I see it in the SG350 switches. I have been using them for over 10 years. I started with SG300 switches. I have also used a SG550x for a VOIP setup in a small business with vlan priority for 19 IP phones. This is where VOIP traffic has a higher que priority in the core switch which is handed off to the router. Cisco makes this really easy to setup in their small business switches. I run my switches setup with L3 to a pfsense router. Maybe early to Untangle many years ago back when I ran an email system. Untangle many years ago had an email scan. I don't know nowadays as I have not run email for many years. My pfsense router knows nothing about my vlans in my Cisco L3 switch. I route to pfsense and pfsense routes back to my Cisco L3 switch which right now is cbs350 switch.
The login freezing thing seems to be an issue with the newest firmware. I've deployed a few dozen of these before the newer firmware was released and hadn't seen this issue. Now we're deploying with the new firmware and the issue showed up after upgrading to 3.3
The only reason I sent the switches back that I bought was due to the fact that they placed the brackets 1" back from the face of the switch which meant I couldn't close the front door on my networking rack. Have they released the new brackets yet that fix this? ETA: I didn't have the pausing issues on my CBS350-24P-4X switch.
Rather stupid question but is there any way to configure ports on cbs 350 with trunk mode, without RSTP but with some function like (TRILL/Fabricpath or SBP) or is it only available on series like catalyst and nexus? (the need here is to be able to recognize loop and shut down ports that may pass the loopback, broadcast storm and not have the whole network down by some manual connection mistake).
Thanks for putting this review content together. I was thinking about to get either this model over the Ubiqiti switches for a home lab. Do you know what type of license do you to use these switches. Could use them without license? I am wondering if you need the license to get new OS version. Again, thanks for the content videos.
CIsco is a nightmare, always have had issues with their equipment. Not to mention the insane licensing costs, and the complacent support and refusal of them to fix issues. Some fairly big players in the industry have dumped their products because of catastrophic network failures. Remember that major outage in Canada last year??
I wanna know the power consumption in WATT, the data sheet forces me to calculate it by myself. Not hard to do, but inconvenient because cisco tend to waste Energy at idle like 60 watts… energy is absurd expensive these days.
You haven't touched on power usage, noise, throughput, features, basically... anything. This is a really weird video to call a review when it doesn't really review anything except how slow it is to load.
I agree. I believe Tom mentioned somewhere (was it a talking heads episode over at craftcomputing?) that he doesn't like long review videos (referring to the likes of GN) and wants to know within 10 minutes if he should buy the product or not. That's fair, but like you pointed out, from this under 10 minute video there is simply not enough data to make a valid decision whether or not the product is a good buy. There's nothing holding someone back from skipping ahead in a longer video to the parts of interest or even to the end if you're just interested in the conclusion and want it in under 10 minutes. Perhaps Tom also doesn't want to spend that much time on review videos. That's also understandable cause those long videos are undoubtedly very time consuming to make. But then why chose to "review" something in the first place? 🤷 It feels kind of weird to learn more about the devices from reading the comments than from watching the video. I love Tom's tutorials on setting up things, but the reviews feel a bit underwhelming to say the least. 🫤
It's a hard balance to find as these did not interest me enough to spend hours diving into them but enough people asked about them so I made the video. Also a short video on a switch series gets WAY MORE views than a long video on each switch where I am mostly reading out specs. I would much rather spend my time making a long tutorial which brings more value to the community.
It’s good when the native language is English, but it’s bad if the native language is different, you have to spend a lot of time to learn all the configurations :( :( :(
Oh wow it's kinda overpriced and the web interface sucks. I assume nobody with a real cisco cert will ever touch the webgui and will all connect a serial and do stuff on the console so they don't care. But so far they are not winning against Mikrotik, either with SwitchOS or RouterOS.
Ahhahha cisco is recognized as expert to make slow web interfaces on all products, SMB or enterprise or telco systems.. there is no difference, they all sucks, i hate to use them.. specialy FMC, really hate this platform
If there is anyone I trust about SMB product reviews (and of course everything else he talks about), it's Tom!
Great to see your video! I'm glad that it wasn't' the same experience as you had with the Dashboard! And thank you for going the extra mile to properly test things like you always do.
Thanks!
I recently moved my home network over to these switches and I've been very impressed. I can't say I spotted the pausing on the web interface although I only briefly tried it - I bought these switches particularly for the CLI (since many other similarly priced options were web UI only) and ended up taking each switch out the box, using a serial cable to enable SSH/telnet and disable the web UI then performed the rest of the configuration over the CLI. It's definitely not IOS but it's still pretty flexible and easy to get used to - I'd previously noted down all of my previous switch port configuration files in a spreadsheet and was able to easily generate CLI config from this. I'd view it similarly to moving from Cisco IOS to another brand of CLI managed switch - it's not IOS, but it's not bad at at all!
Recently discovered your channel and really impressed with your content. Keep up the great work 👍
Your channel is where I saw them.
Where I work, we find it is easier to manage our Enterprise Cisco Catalyst switches via console than to deal with the dashboard. For monitoring, we use Solarwinds and it has been working well for the last 7-8 years now
Had a nightmare experience stacking two of the 350X's with an NGP. Adding the NGP broke the existing stack and had to be rebuilt; every couple of days, the stack would be unresponsive via its IP address, updating to cisco's recommended firmware didn't fix it and after a factory reset of all of the switches, both the NGP and one of the 350X's just refused to boot. 🙃Ended up RMA'ing it and no problems after, but it definitely shaved a few years off of my life trying to fix it.
I inherited a bunch of Cisco SG SG300-28's and have been looking at these for the increased uplink speed. Thank you for this review!
I just a regular person and I bought a SG300-10 10-Port Gigabit Managed Switch five years ago for $132 that I use with my pfSense router and OpenWRT AP. The GUI on switch is much better than what you just showed me and still going strong aside from it no longer being updated. Setting up the vLans seemed to be more involved too.
In the near future, I will be looking for a new switch with POE. Thanks for you short review on these.
i have 20+ switches of 350 series, with Cisco Business Dashboard (25 device free) working for past 2 years, dam stable, but one thing u need to keep in mind to update the firmware in regular interval..... i love these switches with combination with CBD
Bro that wait time vs just CLI. Holy cow 😂. I really appreciate this channel btw. Has been extremely helpful when i started networking!
I got a Cisco CBS350-24T-4X-EU since 2022-11 mainly as my layer-3 core switch (IPv4 and IPv6) at home in combination with my Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch ES-16-XG (used as layer-2 core switch) and I am quite happy with it as it was indeed affordable considering it's a Cisco device. No special licenses or service contracts required, not even for firmware updates..
The web interface is very slow. The CLI is not identucal to known Catalyst switches but many commands will work.
SNMP now supports ISO OIDs for mac address scanning instead of Cisco specific OIDs. I rather like that.
Cisco is affordable. Just remember, they have a license for that.
😂😂
Did you buy the license to post this comment before posting the comment?
Ahh yes the C-GLBL454-WTF99-AFFDBL-99FTW-⁶66⁶-SCRWD-247955 license is only $99/port per day.
Which is why all 260 of our clients are no longer on cisco
@@balla2172😂😂😂😂😂 yea the way the treat EOL products is also insane😂😂😂 the license to use IOS is not transferable, that means if you’ve brought used Cisco product, you will need to relicense to use it legally. If your product is EOL, sorry we can’t fix it even you wish to pay. I’m so sad that I need to trash my 3750-E for this stupid reason. I just hope one day I might be able to get it up and running legally.
I feel like these are the evolution of the Linksys SRW product line that Cisco then moved over to the SG line. Cisco added some Cisco features like CDP & a IOS like CLI to them but it wasn't quite the same. It's a product line that I hadn't had great experience with in the past so I've kind of avoided it.
Been looking into cisco small business switches for some time now. It would be interesting to see a video /series on switches for home lab or enthuhiast level for 10 gig in 2023. 😊
Thanks for doing this video Tom! I was looking for a future replacement for my Cisco SG250-08HP Switch and I was having trouble finding a current up-to-date version of their locally managed switches with POE+. I am trying to avoid using my USW-Lite-8 switch from UI as a main/core switch but instead as a backup/extension only. Thanks again! :)
I've got a few dozen of the previous version of these(SG300) out there and for the most part they've been rock solid, and the CLI is decent enough. Some of them are probably 9 or 10 years old by now and I think I've had 1 case of having to replace one with a hardware issue?
I've replaced a couple with the CBS350s last year and noticed the same thing with the web UI, luckily just needed to get in long enough to enable SSH. They're definitely decent small/medium business switches.
I've used the SG500-24 and -48. Also used the SG350-10, -24, -48
I personal didn't enjoy the SG500 series. Has fans fail on them all the time. Yes I was able to get them exchanged but when you having to replace the replacement after 1 yr use, it's not fun.
Never had any issues with the SG350 series.
Interface on both can be slow or painful slow at times, depending on what you are doing.
Great video Tom. we bought a number of the CBS switches and apart from being fairly reliable we found the release quite dissapointing from the slowness of the gui which hasnt really improved since the sg300 days and concept that someone at cisco decided to change the mounting position of the rack ears so the unit sticks out the front of everything else has been a massive head shaker for us. We have spent many hours on the dashboard trying to get it to work properly which did connect and do things but seemed quite flawed with many issues that got us asking why would a company like Cisco even release such a product. Holding our breath that a future fix might fix all of these issues. yay! :) p.s. the position (under the port where you cant see it?) of the port LED indicators is another conversation I would love to have with them. who made that decision and are they fired yet? :)
Hey Tom is it possible to do a review of different managed switches here in 2023 and give some of your recommendations? Something that would fit good for Homelabs and Small Businesses.
Maybe you have a network issue. Spanning tree is your friend in multiple switch setups. You can use portfast with clients but not recommended with switches. I do not have the slow issue you are seeing on the cbs350 switches in the GUI nor do I see it in the SG350 switches. I have been using them for over 10 years. I started with SG300 switches. I have also used a SG550x for a VOIP setup in a small business with vlan priority for 19 IP phones. This is where VOIP traffic has a higher que priority in the core switch which is handed off to the router. Cisco makes this really easy to setup in their small business switches. I run my switches setup with L3 to a pfsense router. Maybe early to Untangle many years ago back when I ran an email system. Untangle many years ago had an email scan. I don't know nowadays as I have not run email for many years. My pfsense router knows nothing about my vlans in my Cisco L3 switch. I route to pfsense and pfsense routes back to my Cisco L3 switch which right now is cbs350 switch.
Lawrence show only web mgmt, because because ssh gets stuck even more...
It started with the SG350 and has stayed that way.
The SBS350 switches also don't appear to support AOC, which is frustrating if you have long runs between switch stacks.
@Lawrence Systems, could you please explain what happen with Small Business Routers, RV series and is there any replacement for that?
The login freezing thing seems to be an issue with the newest firmware. I've deployed a few dozen of these before the newer firmware was released and hadn't seen this issue. Now we're deploying with the new firmware and the issue showed up after upgrading to 3.3
The only reason I sent the switches back that I bought was due to the fact that they placed the brackets 1" back from the face of the switch which meant I couldn't close the front door on my networking rack.
Have they released the new brackets yet that fix this?
ETA: I didn't have the pausing issues on my CBS350-24P-4X switch.
Rather stupid question but is there any way to configure ports on cbs 350 with trunk mode, without RSTP but with some function like (TRILL/Fabricpath or SBP) or is it only available on series like catalyst and nexus? (the need here is to be able to recognize loop and shut down ports that may pass the loopback, broadcast storm and not have the whole network down by some manual connection mistake).
Have you used any of the Netgear AV switches? Would love to see a review on those at some point.
Thanks for putting this review content together. I was thinking about to get either this model over the Ubiqiti switches for a home lab. Do you know what type of license do you to use these switches. Could use them without license? I am wondering if you need the license to get new OS version. Again, thanks for the content videos.
It's odd when talking about Cisco, but no licence needed for the switch :)
The non IOS definitely threw me off the first time around on the CBS 350
CIsco is a nightmare, always have had issues with their equipment. Not to mention the insane licensing costs, and the complacent support and refusal of them to fix issues. Some fairly big players in the industry have dumped their products because of catastrophic network failures. Remember that major outage in Canada last year??
Thanks Jack, good info
I wanna know the power consumption in WATT, the data sheet forces me to calculate it by myself. Not hard to do, but inconvenient because cisco tend to waste Energy at idle like 60 watts… energy is absurd expensive these days.
Do you think the higher end switch is so slow because it’s trying to call home and waiting for a timeout?
don't think so
I wonder if HPE Aruba line is any better?
I have reviewed them before, they are fine but their cloud is just super basic.
You haven't touched on power usage, noise, throughput, features, basically... anything.
This is a really weird video to call a review when it doesn't really review anything except how slow it is to load.
I agree. I believe Tom mentioned somewhere (was it a talking heads episode over at craftcomputing?) that he doesn't like long review videos (referring to the likes of GN) and wants to know within 10 minutes if he should buy the product or not. That's fair, but like you pointed out, from this under 10 minute video there is simply not enough data to make a valid decision whether or not the product is a good buy.
There's nothing holding someone back from skipping ahead in a longer video to the parts of interest or even to the end if you're just interested in the conclusion and want it in under 10 minutes. Perhaps Tom also doesn't want to spend that much time on review videos. That's also understandable cause those long videos are undoubtedly very time consuming to make. But then why chose to "review" something in the first place? 🤷 It feels kind of weird to learn more about the devices from reading the comments than from watching the video.
I love Tom's tutorials on setting up things, but the reviews feel a bit underwhelming to say the least. 🫤
It's a hard balance to find as these did not interest me enough to spend hours diving into them but enough people asked about them so I made the video. Also a short video on a switch series gets WAY MORE views than a long video on each switch where I am mostly reading out specs. I would much rather spend my time making a long tutorial which brings more value to the community.
Hmm. I’ll stick with my UniFi USW
It’s good when the native language is English, but it’s bad if the native language is different, you have to spend a lot of time to learn all the configurations :( :( :(
Cisco or not...that is a lot of money for what appears to be a layer 2 switch.
Mmm... Telnet management.... Feels like security.
Hi Lawrence, can you review the tplink tl-sg3210-xhp-m2 ? Thanks
I have tested the TP-Link switches, they work, they are cheap, I don't trust them to be secure.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS 8 2500Mbps ports with PoE and 2 SFP+.. it is for a home network.. I'm planning to get one
Cisco switches are slow takes a few min before the link is up
True
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS isn‘t that related to the spanning tree settings?
I have 10 of the CBS350's in my network. DO NOT TURN ON SMART PORT!! THAT IS A JUNK FEATURE!
Truenas scale 23-10??
Oh wow it's kinda overpriced and the web interface sucks. I assume nobody with a real cisco cert will ever touch the webgui and will all connect a serial and do stuff on the console so they don't care. But so far they are not winning against Mikrotik, either with SwitchOS or RouterOS.
8 LAGGs :(
Another reason not to choose Cisco.
I don't think you are capable of a rant. That video was a low key enumeration of disfunction.
Thanks and enumeration of disfunction would be a good way to title that video. 😜
Same interface as their wireless offerings. Immediately gives a bad taste in my mouth!
Boo in the fact you don't get the full Cisco IOS..
That is covered in the video.
Ahhahha cisco is recognized as expert to make slow web interfaces on all products, SMB or enterprise or telco systems.. there is no difference, they all sucks, i hate to use them.. specialy FMC, really hate this platform
Licensing? Nope...
As I stated in the video, there is not any Licensing on these models.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS my bad, I used to have a lot of headaches with Cisco and Meraki licensing...
I dont trust Cisco after Snowden Leaks