Cisco Catalyst 1000 Review

tom here from lauren systems we're going to talk about the cisco catalyst 1000 switches these are targeted at small business because they're affordable and they are license free which is not something i expected to say about cisco all in one sentence like that i purchased these and the adventure starts on december 9th and i want to bring up that i bought them this is not paid for or endorsed by cisco the review i'm going to do is my opinion and i'm not a cisco person so to speak i'm not a cisco engineer i'm not a certified cisco person and if you've watched this channel for any length of time you know i'm not necessarily the biggest cisco fan i find them to be a little bit quirky and sometimes overly complicated to get tasks done and it's one of the reasons i prefer some of the other network vendors but i will give as they say the devil they're due cisco does make a very solid and reliable device they are notably and many of our clients have these that they've been installed for years and despite occasional reboots for a firmware update they do last you usually pull a cisco out because of obsolescence and being in a really old switch not because it failed and these being a fanless design the two models that i have right here passively cooled i would expect a very long service life out of them but i also want to address directly that network chuck video about the auto configuration and it not going the way i expected i bring this up because i was impressed when i thought they auto configured like that which is part of the reason i bought two of them i wanted to see if they would automatically stack and they don't and i'm being very specific about this because they don't automatically stack but you can manually configure them i want to give a big shout out to willie howe he spent some time with me diving into the technical things because willie is someone who knows cisco very well and confirmed about the way these work i also did read through the cisco documentation they do not auto-configure there is some specifics to the way you configure them we will cover in this review um but before we dive into all these details let's first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrences.com if you'd like to hire a share project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now both of these eight port switch the poe and the non-poe have pretty much the same chassis the only thing really different here is the non-poe has a built-in and then on the poe we have a power brick an external one now let's take a look at the switch ports a little bit closer now you have your options right here for how you want to console in you have the little button right here which you hold in for four seconds which will show us how to get this configured and set up then we have all your standard switch ports and then we have the combo ports now the combo ports can be used either in the rj45 or in the sfp but not both simultaneously so this is port 9 for sfp and port 9 for rj45 and the same goes for port 10. now this is the poe model so we have the little yellow labeling here and shows that it's poe and then on the back we have a kensington lock and the spot for the four pin 54 volt 1.6 amp power supply the other one like i said looks identical pretty much the same as far as the front of the chassis goes it just doesn't have any power labels same shared ports same access but then a standard connector on the back and a kensington lock on the side so not much difference there as far as how the switches themselves look they're pretty much like i said the same chassis and they do not have or did not come with any rack ears or ability to mount them so they are standalone switches like this i do have some screw holes on the side but not anything that would allow you to easily mount something for them there's probably some kit you can order but as i ordered from amazon this is how they came now the stacking we should jump right into that part of it because the single ip management and the network chuck video was where my immediate confusion came in i was excited to see a cisco switch that would configure the first switch and deploy every subsequent switch a couple things first in order to get h stacking to work you do need to use the sfp so even though these are combo ports if you plug them in and stack these together and you use the rj45 it will not configure h stack it can only work over the sfp so plugging it in like this won't work but if we plug in sfp modules and go over here and put this this one here and this one here you can use them as uplink over the rj45 but you can't use them for the single ip management next thing is the transfigures themselves whether you're using a fiber transceiver a dac twin x cable or in this case an rj45 adapter they require that you use cisco very specifically it has to be tag cisco we tried the cisco command which is technically undocumented that allows the use of third-party non-cisco branded transceivers and it just didn't work um it the command is there and this is where willie helped me out so you have to use cisco and these are important details i think when you're pointing this out when if someone were to buy this to build out a small office and maybe they bought some of the you know larger 24 or 40 port models of this and they wanted to build out that single ip management interface you can't just run a cable over to it you have to run an sfp that's just part of the way it sets up and that sfp has to be and if you're a cisco person you're like oh yeah you just type the command in except around the cisco catalyst 1000 that command just does not function and you do have to use cisco sfps so little details when you're buying them out next little detail about hdac and how that works is this line right here 1g switches can only be grouped with 1g switches and 10g switches only with 10g switches so if you mix and match your switches and here's their lineup of all the ones that have just one gig ports on them and these are the models that offer 10 gig ports homes you have four 10 gig ports on these and you have only the one gig ports on here therefore you can't mix and match them so if you were to buy a handful of like these c1000 48 fp 4xl the 10g ones you could group those together into a single management stack and you could group any of these models over here into a single management stack but then you would have two stacks to manage i just want to make sure some of that is clear in part as part of the review because i think these things matter quite a bit when you're looking at a switch and you want to order a kit out you want to make sure everything you buy works the way you expect it to or at least that you have all the parts to complete your network so once all that's out of the way no big deal now the hdac itself the auto configure like showed in chuck's video may come from the fact that once you configure hdac and you take these switches and i configure them to talk to each other and wander through the configuration which by the way is all document documented right here it can be done in a web interface but it also can be done right through here from the command line cisco's got plenty of documentation on it and for cisco veterans it's pretty straightforward if you're less familiar with cisco commands it may be a little bit more complex but what this does is allow you to log into one switch and control all the ports for all the switches that you've stacked together into the single ip management interface and once you configure the hdac on these they survive a write erase reset so if you reset the config and you've already configured the hdac when you reset the config and start setting switch up again and plug them in they'll actually start talking again over the hdac which i thought was interesting it doesn't go to the normal write config so this is what happens when you set them up and then maybe erase them and i'm assuming that's probably what chuck had done in his video so he was unclear on it but you set them up and then they will start deploying what they won't do though is from a factory fresh out of the box plug them in even if you've configured the first switch each subsequent switch you plug in with an sfp doesn't auto configure and add to it without going through the manual process as laid out in the cisco documentation now how do you get these set up that's actually pretty simple and uh we'll go ahead and switch over to the console screen and show you how that goes all right we've plugged it in and booting it up first time in boots it does take up roughly 60 seconds before it's ready it goes to verifying the image and the boot up process steps all right and now the switch is booted up now you do not need to use this console cable to do this this was just a way so i can show what's going on during the boot process here and then you can go here and walk through the setup what's interesting is you have to hold the status led three to four seconds and then release it we'll show what that does on the screen but what they don't mention is you can do it for the cli but what they're not mentioning here is what happens if i start touching buttons on here i bring that up because if you start at all messing with the cli here you can run through the cli to configure this still so it can be set up manually but it will then stop that button from working and when i first got this there's a little bit of confusion on there so i wanted to see what's going on and i started going through it i'm like okay let me hold the button now no once you've started typing here it seems to stop that button from working but we're going to go ahead and hold the button ending so you can see what does happen on the screen there we go and we have now express mode entered once you enter express mode the switch will be assigned the ip address of both 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.3 plug in a network cable and please note i had nothing plugged in before i believe if you plug in a network cable and it finds a dhcp server it also won't let it go into auto setup i ran into that uh where i thought i could just have it all plugged in and ready and go through this setup when it finds a dcp server it doesn't necessarily go into auto setup just things that i think are important to note on these now that i plug this in i'll go ahead and ping to make sure i can reach it all right i can reach 10 dot there or i can reach 10 0 0 3. like i said it assigns both my laptop i've already assigned statically to 1002 and now we can actually jump into the configuration the day zero wizard will provide an interface to configure your basic settings like ip username and vlan go to wizard set up the host name set up the username password and we'll just throw some stuff in here real quick build out your interface configuration sets your data vlan data wireless fan access port so some of the basics can be configured i p addresses you want to assign to it subnet and default gateway summary and now we can log in now i've already got the other switch configured at a different ip address so we'll actually go ahead and pull that one up real quick and here we are at the dashboard now this is the dashboard specifically to the poe one and they're the same except for the extra poe option so i figured i'd show you this one because well there's a couple extra features that are in here now here's your uplink ports and by default out of the box they're configured as uplink ports but then if we were to configure into hdac they will disappear and be part of the hdac ports that are in here but over all the dashboards pretty basic and simple gets the job done it doesn't offer you a lot it offers you kind of just some viewing and stats of what's going on show you what clients are connected it does allow you to do configuration for the switch settings and the hdex settings so if you didn't want to configure them in terms of going from the command line option you can go in here and do this of note because this works very much like a cisco where you have to save the config and reload it that's important because it says update and apply to device but then you still have to remember to restart the device or the command in cisco is reload to apply all those configurations also of note when you're configuring cisco is the option after you change things to save the configuration up here are you sure you want to save this configuration because you can apply a change that may happen but you don't write that change out and for those of you familiar with the cisco and when you're doing it from the command line the right of the running config is an important step that sometimes people forget and then they reboot the switch later and they didn't save the running config to the boot time config so that is important you do that on these switches you do get alerts and error message up here and one of the annoyances is right out of the box these constantly try to reach out and do tftp and we'll just generate errors until you turn it off that is actually part of the default config which i thought was weird it's kind of an annoyance but i did leave it on so i could show that every now and then it'll just kick out a tftp error because that's how they work out of the box until you configure them and tell them not to do that you can go through and do the port configurations here general settings port settings advanced settings but some of the even more advanced security settings i didn't notice them in here at all that's still something you're going to have to go through on the command line troubleshooting this was a bit of confusion because i didn't know where to reboot the switch apparently you reboot it under troubleshooting not under settings or services and this is also where you would go and do a factory reset if you want to reset the switch without going to the command line to do the right erase and do it you can restart the switch here or factory reset it all together you do have ping and trace route a few other diagnostics you can do all test basic tests take a look at the logs or the debugging information i do like that they've done this right here so you can just copy things or download them so now we can go and pull these logs up in a text editor so definitely very convenient uh for when you're troubleshooting without having to you know drop back and forth or try to highlight and copy in some weird way i can just hit that and go to there vlan configuration can be done in here services static routing this does not support anything more than just static routes i do like this without plugging into the console we can just exec or run config type commands such as show version and we can see that this is running version 15.27 e1 security settings access policies acl span options routing protocol arm on and qos so you can do quite a bit of configuration through the web interface and in web is reasonable enough management now i was disappointed here that you can't enable ssh so if you went through the wizard and didn't go through the configuring of ssh you can still go through and do it from the command line through the console but there's not a way just to turn it on inside of here by default it supports both http on port 80 and https on port 443. here's where you reload your firmware update for the web ui or the ios and web ui push thing there disappointing part is it does not automatically go to cisco's website to try to pull the firmware you have to go to cisco's website and download it by the way you have to register and it also took a few days before cisco validated my account apparently there's some type of it says doing a background check was the email they do a background check or something along those lines before validating emails which i thought was strange then they'll let you download the firmware and get these things up to date then under system we have config file dhcp and this is where you can actually transfer to the switch from the switch to a tftp server or download the file so you can pull the config out and it does support multi-user administration and then they have some of the help documents here so pretty straightforward i think once you have them set up hold it for a few seconds i just kind of glossed over the fact that it does have bluetooth to me that seems like an odd way i've never thought i really had a desire to configure the switch bluetooth neat that they threw that in there um but i mean maybe some more devices come with bluetooth like laptops because it just lets you get to the interface differently and i guess it's is on bluetooth proximity-based so you can enable it so you don't have to uh do the cable but to me ssh seems like a better way to do that but the web interface is usable for those of you that are looking for a little more power and or just want to start learning at cisco yes you have full access to that you know the cisco ios 15 software my understanding though this will not run anything other than what they refer to as classic ios it doesn't do the newer i think it's ios xc and xr like i said cisco's not my exact forte but i think they're a good lineup that are fitting that budget for people go you know i just want to see that cisco name in my rack and i trust that and i have a strong use case for the way cisco does their security or you're familiar with it they're great because they're now something that will still fit the client's budget and make cisco people very happy and so i don't think they're a bad purchase in that circumstance yes of course there's still going to be other people that are out there that have other offerings that are a little bit less money but this is one of the few times i've seen where you can buy this cisco switch and have all those fancy features for a fairly reasonable price i think at that 300 mark um that's actually like i said for cisco that's actually pretty good and i'm kind of surprised like i said i didn't think i'd say affordable in cisco in there it's still going to be on a little bit higher end side but i won't argue about the reliability i mean to be a fan of some of the quirks of cisco software or the fact that it doesn't like anything but cisco sfp adapters or that the single ip management interface can only be grouped with certain switches and some of the other gotchas but i won't argue that if i put this in i will trust it to be working several years later without even anybody doing anything to it so i will hand cisco that on reliability um take that for what it's worth uh let me know in the comments below what you think of these and i'll post this over on my forums as well thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to launchsystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.lawrences.com 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 32,353

Keywords: lawrencesystems, cisco catalyst 1000, cisco catalyst 1000 series switches, cisco catalyst 1000 series, cisco catalyst 1000 stacking, cisco catalyst 1000 switch, cisco catalyst 1000 factory reset, cisco catalyst 1000 layer 3, cisco catalyst 1000 installation guide, cisco catalyst 1000 default password, cisco, catalyst, #networking

Id: pvF_MDjbF6M

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021