Need Some Advice... Netgate XG-7100 vs. SG-6100

Networking & Firewalls
1

I’m currently running a SG-4860 and looking to upgrade and I’ve been watching XG-7100’s sell on ebay for reasonable prices compared to the 6100.

I’ve read that the ports on the 7100 are switched but I don’t fully understand the implications of that. I run multiple VLANs through my single LAN port with my setup and it sounds easy enough to set up on the 7100. What worries me is if I’ll be able to restore from a back up taken from my 4860 and what extra steps I’ll have to take.

Currently I only use two ports on my SG-4860, one to WAN and one to a UniFi switch for LAN.

I’d like to connect pfSense to my switch over SPF and AFAIK the 7100 is also upgradable to a 2.5gbps NIC via PCIe.

I like the form factor of the 7100, don’t care about fans and like that the 7100 is upgradable via pcie and memory.

Is there any valid reason people would be dumping their 7100’s right now that I should avoid picking one up for a quite a bit less than the 6100 with rack mount?

This is for home lab. Only thing mission critical here is my wife’s YouTubeTV.

2

Recently, I wanted to restore my config to a backup router which is very similar to my main router (both non-netgate). The full restore didn’t work, I tried restoring section by section which did work. However, it still needed a bit of tweaking but was faster than doing a full config from scratch.

You can inspect the config file and you’ll notice the difference between the two, which helps.

3

I am not a big fan of the built in ports using the weird VLAN setup but you can also just use the 10G ports or put in an add in card with 4 more ports to avoid the extra setup on the built in ports.

The 7100 is cheaper because it’s past end of sale, but not past end of life. Netgate 7100 1U Security Gateway End of Sale