I brought a UniFi Switch Aggregation (USW-Aggregation) online as the backbone of my home network and have been testing it out for the past few days. So far it's working well and is handling multi-gig traffic between my homelab servers
Setup and Initial Impressions
The switch comes with the usual UniFi rackmount brackets. They screwed in smoothly to the sides of the switch like every other UniFi device. The switch is not very deep at all; it's about half the depth of my 16 and 14 port switches and I was a little bit shocked at how small it was when I pulled it out of the box. I mounted it into my rack, and connected a DAC cable between the switch and UDM-Pro, and then hit a roadblock.
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| The USW-Aggregation is shallower than the switches up top and the UDM-Pro below |
I went to check the UDM-Pro in my app, and it was no longer responding. After manually powercycling the UDM-Pro it was able to link to the USW-Aggregation for adoption. However, it still has not shown up in the Android UniFi Network app. This appears to just be an issue in the Android app because it shows up just fine in iOS and in the web interface.
From there, setup was no different than any UniFi switch. Firmware upgrade went smoothly and I was able to configure link aggregations over to my switches. This did require manually setting the port speed going to my switches which are not 10G capable. I was able to configure link aggregation for two DAC cables connecting over SFP to my USW-24-PoE. This did require manually setting the port speed on the USW-Aggregation side to 1G since my USW-24PoE isn't 10G capable
Testing
Each of the ports only has the ability to be set to 1G or 10G modes, but with the use of SFP+/10GBase-T transcievers I've had no issues linking to my 10GbE on my Unraid server or a 5GbE USB adapter. I'm also able to get a 10G link over DAC between the UDM-Pro and the Aggregation as well as to an SFP+ card in a Proxmox server. Running iperf between servers shows a real-world transfer speed over 9Gbps.
Running a speedtest from the internet to one of my servers yields similarly expected results. Since Comcast recently turned on the ability to access overprovisioned bandwidth I'm able to pull over 1.2Gbps through my internet connection with spikes up over 1.4Gbps. Since they're going to start charging for unlimited data (an issue for another day) I'm glad to at least be getting a little something extra in my available bandwidth.
Pricing
Ubiquiti is presently selling the USW-Aggregation for $269. It's got the usual clean and solid Ubiquiti build quality, and runs silently since it's fanless. Compared to the ~$140 4-port Mikrotik I've seen a lot of people using, this is getting me 8 SFP+ ports in a more preferable rack-mount form factor for less than double the cost. Personally I felt like this was a reasonable price for an 8 port multi-gigabit switch. It's getting me the multi-gig transfer speeds I wanted between my homelab servers and is allowing me reach beyond gigabit on my Comcast connection.
Conclusion
Other than the initial issues getting the UDM-Pro to talk to my USW-Aggregation, and the Aggregation still not appearing in the Android app, the experience here was quite smooth. Everything seems to be working well, and the USW-Aggregation is passing traffic at multi-gig speeds around the network, with no issues handling the backend of the other switches.
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