Looking for Opinions - switching to Unifi and Adding some redundancy

Networking & Firewalls
1

So I’ve decided I think I want to take a stab at UNIFI switching. I already use their AP’s and love them, and my cisco gear is getting log in the tooth, plus they are power hogs. In the process of redesigning my home network , cough, lab, cough (see wife’s eyes rolling) , I also wanted to build in some more redundancy. Primarily because I’m nervous about the single power supplies in the unifi switches, and also because I’d like to protect around bricking a switch on an upgrade (which compared to cisco) is more frequent. If my design is ok, and my math is right, this is also cheaper than having the 2 of the redundant power modules (the network switches and the server switches are in separate racks).

Network Upgrade Concept
Network Upgrade Concept1048×745 55 KB

I think this is the direction I’m heading. I wanted to bounce it off people that have more experience with unifi than me :slight_smile:

Notes :

  1. Full mesh on the USQ-Aggregation switches
  2. as I understand vmware , feeding from two switches should be fine
  3. Unsure about Freenas (yes I haven’t upgraded it to truenas yet) and feeding from 2 switches
  4. Unsure about the PFSENSE box and multiple switch links but I believe if I read properly this should work.
  5. Assuming RSTP enable between the switches of course.
  6. On all links with the exception of the freenas box, they are trunked/multi VLAN

Is there anything that I’m going to get into serious trouble with ?

and lastly, What IF I wanted to LAGG any of the connections to the servers. could I LAGG group them and still have separate failover switches… Understanding that Unifi doesn’t support MLAGG but could I do 2 10gig lagg on one switch and a failover to another 2 10Gig lag on the other switch ? Not that I need 20gig but since I’m on a learning path I’m curious as to what I COULD do :slight_smile:

I welcome comments and opinions…

Thanks!

2

Seems fine in general. I would set the two ports on PFSense in a bridge with RSTP, with PFSense as the root (manually set its cost low).

3

Ok glad I’m not out in left field.

I assume your suggesting the pfsense box being the root because it’s the common point to most of the traffic ? or is it just a personal preference ?

4

Well, if you don’t have the PFSense being root, meaning something else is root, you are going to have one of those two PFSense ports disabled by RSTP in a steady-state. So why not have PFSense be the root and then both those connections are up normally?

5

There is solid logic in what you’re saying, hadn’t thought of that.

6

On the other hand, that would place PFSense as the single allowed connection between what ends up being two halves of switches. So it could be a bottleneck for same-subnet high speed traffic. So it depends on what you are most worried about performance-wise - traffic to/from the router, or traffic in the same subnet.

7

Well I pulled the trigger… some new toys will be coming in the next bit… Then the fun begins. I know what I’ll be doing for part of my summer holidays lol :slight_smile:

Thanks for the help!

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