Should You Buy A UniFi Dream Machine, USG, USG Pro, or Dream Machine Pro?

tom here from orange systems and we do a lot of network engineering and consulting and the products we do consult on include some of the unified products which brings up the question tom you talk about these warehouse jobs or these large scale deployments of unifi but you kind of skipped over the fact that you didn't use a usg or unified dream machine or pro models of either one of those in your video and there's a reason for that and they have some shortcomings now i'm not here to just tell you it's a crappy product and don't buy it i want to make sure you're a more informed consumer because that's ultimately what the goal is here is to make sure you understand what it can do what it can't do and then make your decision on whether or not you want to purchase that device now this is october of 2021 so these are the things and features or shortcomings it has as of right now if sometime in the future they release a different model that has better features that's awesome but right now this is where we're at so think about that when you're looking at it because they may fix all these issues but as of right now they haven't now one of the problems i'm going to say that unifi has solved better than probably anyone out there and why they're such a popular topic is making network equipment easier to use the unified software defined networking controller is a really nice in the big picture of things way to manage a lot of devices without licensing fees this is one of the reasons we like their switches and their access points so much they've made it easy to use they've made it easy for scalable use from companies like myself who manage outside networks for companies and putting it all in one controller and it makes for a really nice product but that one little component is the usg and not having the best firewall features is why i end up not recommending it so i want to make this list here of the shortcoming so you can be informed about before you buy it and we'll start with the unified dream machine and dream machine pro and that first shortcoming really comes down to the forced registration some people get really angry about this i think rightfully so because forcing someone to register the device in order to get it to work is not in my opinion a great idea they changed it this is not a feature it had before but at one point it they decided that was how it's going to work i don't think in the very beginning it did i could be wrong but i know right now it does if you want to run any of the latest firmware this is very problematic because one of two things can happen one registration server can go down and then you can't register or get your device configured two if something happens they discontinue a product line and discontinuing offering registration for it you have a product that can't be turned on anymore now the registration is only for getting it set up once it's set up it doesn't need to have that registration server unified be up and running but yeah this is kind of a problem in my opinion but it may be the first reason you don't want to buy it no official wire guard support i say official because yes there are third-party projects to get it working and yes someone may point out it's even embedded into the kernel on the dream machine which hints at a future roadmap where they've deeply integrated this we are talking about october of 2021 where these things are not available and not officially supported on there same thing goes with openvpn they have openvpn but it's designed for site to site work not for user vpn once again sometime in the future they may fix this but right now that's not a feature related to that and very directly related is the no outbound vpn policy routing that you can do so to speak now what this is is a common request people have where they want to take a segment of their network and say i would like to policy route this over a privacy style vpn either they set up themselves or one of the services that offered on there the way to do that would be going to the command line and configuring things and we don't support that on the udm it's not that you can't i'm glad that unified opened up the fact that you can do things from the command line but obviously this starts breaking the idea that this is supposed to be this really nice easy to use all-in-one interface you can't just check a few boxes and have it work this is kind of a problem that a lot of people run into now for the business side of it the no granular control for the failover is a problem when it fails over and doesn't fail over back to the other side when you put it on when one when one fails it fails to land two it doesn't give you good solid grain under control this is kind of an issue for businesses where we need to understand and need to have a better more detailed control over this for home users it's probably fine but we're talking more a little bit more on the business use case and then again some home users may have that and want to have that greater control a lot of times i've seen the answer just being i'm plugging the second one it'll fail over to the first one again this seems like a non-great solution now the next one is going to be kind of related to that and it's the multiple ips on the usg i have no idea why this feature request has been hanging out there for so long and it's still a problem they did add it to the unified dream machine pro line so you can do multiple ip addresses on a single network interface but still not available on the usg this is obviously a huge problem for the business side of the house because well lots of times companies have even a small block of ip addresses for a couple different services they have running and without being able to do that officially through the ui you're left with editing a config on the back end which may break when you do an update which has actually occurred and why we don't support consulting on that particular topic right there so once again official support is the key word here now the things that they do a nice job of is the dpi and having a really nice dashboard and i do like this dashboard it is really nice i can look at my devices in here i can see what's connected i can look at client devices and kind of get an idea with some insight in here but the insight is very limited it doesn't give you deep insight it doesn't give you nice clear website lists it doesn't have easy time slicing so i can really drill into the data you have some very general overview data and i can set it to display one week one month and give you a little bit better idea but it's still not very detailed overall that doesn't let me dive into it plus this client's not on the network so we don't even know the client name it just does this but clone clients are on the network go back to client devices like it sees my pixel 4 that i put on here and it sees the 10 lab system that i put on here but once again it's nice it's a really nice dashboard in terms of looks but when it comes to action items it isn't near as good as some of your enterprise firewalls but there is not all bad here let me explain if none of the aforementioned features were reasons for you not to buy it because you're just looking to get the routing done here not worry about those vpn issues or where the support is going with it you don't really need detailed dpi stats well it does have built-in threat management that is not granular but pretty good they give you a nice dashboard for it so you can turn on and off threat management it is a nice specifically the udm udm pro all in one device that can run your network where you can tie in a few wi-fi they make buildings separated networks really easy there's a little bit of a debate and this is comes down to network engineering opinions of differences but when you create new vlans the default rule is allow all devices to talk to each other that can be easily circumvented by just go ahead and choose guest network and it will not allow those devices on separate vlans to talk to each other but overall as i said in the beginning unify's done a amazing job of making it really easy for people who don't have network engineering degrees to get in there and build a network where you have several different segments and check a couple boxes to make those guest segments so they can't talk to the other networks and you can get that done pretty easy i don't think any company i've seen really has done such a nice job of integrating all that together with a really easy to use dashboard and putting it really in the hands of consumers so it's a good reason to buy the device and overall it's obviously going to be substantially better than whatever your isp for your internet has provided you it's going to be better than probably 99 of the things you can buy off the shelf from a big box store you know your your netgear style routers all that different consumer stuff that's out there so i think is a good replacement for that i think it's really solid for the home users and yes i have family that i have put these in at and because they're an all-in-one device especially the little cylinder one actually kind of like that one for a small apartment works great plus you can add another wi-fi device to it tie it together one dashboard it's clean it's simple it's easy on those type of aspects i think unifi is a good choice to buy but i wanted to make this video so you can be a more informed consumer and decide which one works for you so as long as you go into this knowing and you know it won't do certain things and it will do other things and the overall reliability is still there i will say that because the ones that we have put out for people who don't dive deep into tinkering with it they just kind of set it forget it use the internet watch some netflix and have a good time it does work really well if you're a more advanced user you might want to look at more advanced firewalls and i'll bring them up the two that you'll see the most popular on this channel is going to be untangle mpf sense i've talked a lot about them and they work perfectly fine with unifi we've put these firewalls in many places and had lots of unified switches and access points behind them that even scale into as many as 300 access points and as many switches was needed to support that and no problem putting pf cents on the front end because they needed the more advanced features that were just not available in the usg or the unified dream machine line of product so the opinions in this are all my own i just want to hopefully make you a more informed consumer and this will be my reply video to people who ask why don't you use a unified routing product when you do these large scale network setups alright and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 87,425

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, Dream Machine Pro, dream machine, unifi dream machine, ubiquiti networks, security gateway, unifi udm, dream machine pro setup, unifi dream machine review, unifi security gateway, unifi controller, unifi dream machine pro, ubiquiti unifi, unif dream machine, unifi dream machine vs pro, unifi dream machine pro home network, unifi dream machine pro vpn, unifi dream machine vpn

Id: WY-24alrvCw

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021