PoE needed for studies

techfiend

In the market for a 16-24 port gigabit switch that will temporarily be my home switch. In another year or so I plan on studying cisco and will probably put it in my lab at that point. Is there a reason to spend the extra money on PoE? IOS 15.1?

Is the WS-3650G series the most affordable gigabit switch that's lab worthy? With cisco gigabit seem much more expensive then 100mbit.

Jon_Cisco

For labs most people are using end of life equipment since speed is not an issue and they are a lot cheaper. For CCNA I think PoE is discussed but I never used it in a lab. I picked up a PoE in case I got into voice or Wireless but I don't really expect to need it.

siggnation

techfiend-- Jon is right that you don't need a gigabit switch, but that speed is a bonus. Try to get a L3 switch with 32MB of RAM, so you can get current IOS software. 12.2 and above should work fine. I believe IOS 15.0+ won't be necessary, but can be useful to learn of additional commands.

techfiend

Is there any specific commands for poe other than on/off? Voice interests me and it might be nice to have but I don't mind using wall warts for the phones when I get to that point. Apparently the 3650G can run IOS 15.

I'm running out of ports near to my 4 port router\switch, I have 2 other switches throughout the house and I was thinking of consolidating them but running even more wires isn't in my best interest. Maybe I'll just get another $20 unmanaged switch for now and save some money.

JeanM

siggnation wrote: »

techfiend-- Jon is right that you don't need a gigabit switch, but that speed is a bonus. Try to get a L3 switch with 32MB of RAM, so you can get current IOS software. 12.2 and above should work fine. I believe IOS 15.0+ won't be necessary, but can be useful to learn of additional commands.

You don't really pick the switch the same way as L2 router, in terms of flash and dram

siggnation

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JeanM

OP - decide what devices you'll need to power, there were a couple of different PoE standards. For example a 3550 poe won't power some of the newer devices that need 802.3af.

techfiend

Thing is I don't if or what I want to power, all the phones have the wall wart option anyways right? I'm ok with wall warts.

What I don't want to do is buy a non-poe switch now, then find out there's many poe settings that come up while studying. Is there a bunch of poe settings?