Cisco 35xx on eBay

On a whim, I did a search for some PoE switches on eBay. I wanted to see what use Catalysts are going for these days.

I was shocked. You can pick up a 24 port 3500 for under $300. For under $2,000, you could potentially get a switch, a server and a handful of phones and set up a rock solid Asterisk system for an office. That's crazy, considering the first Cisco VoIP system I put together in around 2002 was well over $80,000 for about 30 phones. Most of it was licensing.

Switch Upgrade

Yesterday was the big switch upgrade. We replaced our old Extreme Alpine 3808 with a stack of Cisco 3750's. Here are the obligatory before and after shots:



















We have three 3750's for the workstations and two 3750G's for our servers (yup, finally gig to all the servers). It's all PoE as well. The 3750's all use the StackWise cables to interconnect at something like 32GBits/second. We've also started using CNA to configure and manage the switch, though I'm still a lot more comfortable with the command line.

Here are some things I've learned about doing this sort of thing:

• If you can afford it, pre-wire all of your ports.

This requires purchasing exactly the number of switch ports as your have ports on your patch panel. We've done this with our general office patch panels, but it wasn't really an option with gig server ports.

When trouble shooting and configuring, we can always assume that if your computer is plugged into the wall jack 2-14, it is also going to be plugged into switchport fastEthernet 2/0/14. That means no more searching for mac addresses to locate ports.

• Put your switches as close to your patch panels as you can

This one helped a lot. Before, our servers plugged into the top of the switch, yet the patch panels where at the bottom of the rack. Workstation patch panels were at the top, while the switch ports plugged into the bottom.

This meant we had to use 7' cables in a lot of cases. We also over filled our cable management as all the cables cross each other.

Each switch is now directly across from the patch panel that plugs into it. We used essentially nothing but 4' patch cables and most of those had one or two feet of slack.

• There is no such thing as too much cable management

And you can never get one that's too small.

We added some, but I wish we had more.

• Cable in bunches

Our patch panels group in 12 and our switches group in 16. It made the most sense for us to wire up twelve cables at a time. We plugged them all into the patch and labeled the far end with the port number. We then velcroed the bundle neatly, ran it through the cable management and wired it up.

Before I attempted silly things, like merging bundles, but that just makes it harder to trace bad cables.

We've tested a lot, but I'm sure Monday and Tuesday with both be long days anyway...