This is the brand new Dream Machine Pro Max, and right off the bat, you'll notice something different about this unified gateway versus the previous models. It has two separate hard drive bays. In this video, I'm gonna dig into all of the nuts and bolts of this new product and also talk about some of the new features that aren't apparent by just looking at the UDM Pro Max from the outside. How does this gateway stack up to its predecessors? Let's find out. Buying brand new equipment and setting it up properly often comes with a learning curve. Have you set everything up with best practices? Is your security tight? Are you using the device to the best of its capabilities? If you need expert help with any of that and more, you can rely on the friendly and helpful network techs at Rogue Support. With Rogue Support, you're just one ticket away from the network of your dreams. All of our techs are experts in wireless, network security, remote access, and we specialize in troubleshooting and configuring unified networks along with any other vendor's equipment. So be sure to contact Rogue Support today on the web at rogue.support. You won't be disappointed. The UDM Pro Max, as of the recording of this video, has an MSRP of $599 USD. This device is designed for large deployments. Okay, this is not for home users, okay? Compared to the UDM Pro and the UDM SE, the UDM Pro Max has some extra horsepower, giving it about twice the overall capacity for devices and clients. I mean, we're talking about 200 or more unified devices and 2,000 or more client devices. Now that's a large deployment, and I'll say it again, this is not a device that is designed for home use. I know that a lot of you have a ton of unified gear, but no one has this much unified gear at home. Taking a closer look at the UDM Pro Max, around the back we have an RPS port for redundant power, as well as a locking power connector and a braided power cable. Across the front we have two hard drive bays, more on that in a moment. We've got an eight-port gigabit switch, a 2.5 gigabit RJ45 WAN port, and two 10 gigabit SFP plus cages. The 2.5 gigabit RJ45 WAN port is an upgrade over the previous model's gigabit WAN port. And just like other models, you can map your WAN connections as port eight of the onboard switch, the 2.5 gigabit RJ45 port, or either of the 10 gigabit SFP plus ports. Now the eight-port gigabit switch on the UDM Pro Max is not a PoE switch like it is on the UDM SE. Because this is a device that's being marketed towards large deployments, the assumption is that those customers are gonna have separate dedicated PoE switches for their PoE-powered equipment. Those separate PoE switches would typically be uplinked with one of the 10 gigabit SFP plus connections. And I'm gonna go over a full enterprise deployment example a little bit later in this video. Now what about ether lighting? Well, even though this is being marketed under the Pro Max umbrella, sadly there is no ether lighting with the eight-port switch on the UDM Pro Max, which is probably gonna disappoint some people because that is a really fun feature. But you'll have to stick to the 24 and 48-port Pro Max switches for that. Both switches have 2.5 gigabit ports, they've got PoE capability, and yes, they do have ether lighting. Now another less obvious but significant upgrade is the computing power inside the UDM Pro Max. If you have a multi-gigabit internet connection, the UDM Pro Max is rated for full wire speed 10 gigabit with the firewall only, or you can get about five gigabits per second with intrusion detection and intrusion prevention enabled. By comparison, the original Dream Machine Pro is rated for 3.5 gigabit with IDS and IPS turned on. So this device is gonna get you about a gigabit and a half of additional throughput when you have all of those bells and whistles enabled. So now let's get to the two hard drive bays on the front of the device. These two drive bays give you the option for RAID 1 redundancy for UniFi Protect surveillance. When you install two hard drives, they automatically configure themselves as RAID 1 and you now have redundant storage for your cameras. Since the theme of the UDM Pro Max is redundancy, they don't give you the option to do RAID 0, right? The extra hard drive is specifically for RAID 1. In my own UDM Pro Max, I bought two one terabyte surveillance drives and they synchronized to RAID 1 automatically in the background in about two hours. There's one more exciting feature compatible with the UDM Pro Max and coming soon and that is shadow mode high availability, which means you can now do automatic failover at the device level. With shadow mode high availability, both gateways are directly connected to each other with a dedicated ethernet link serving as communication channel between the two devices. When the primary device goes down, the shadow or secondary device detects the failure and takes over automatically. High availability isn't available yet, but it will be coming soon with UniFi OS version 4.0. I was able to get access to an alpha version of UniFi OS 4.0 for testing and the setup and failover process is actually pretty straightforward. To me, this is probably the most exciting feature of the upcoming UniFi 4.0 release. In any sort of medium to large business environment, uptime is paramount, right? And before shadow mode high availability, the only way to get redundancy for the dream machine was with a version of shadow mode that required manual intervention to failover. But now, if your primary device loses power, the secondary firewall takes over within about five to 10 seconds. Let's test it out. This is my shadow mode test setup. I have my primary UDM Pro Max on the bottom. I have my secondary UDM Pro Max on the top. This switch right here is my internet connection. I have one internet coming in here and then two going out to each of the WAN ports of the UDM Pro Max routers. Then up top, I have this switch ultra. It is also plugged into each of the Pro Max servers and I have my laptop connected to it right here. All right, so now I'm going to physically unplug the primary UDM Pro Max. I am a professional, don't try this at home. All right, that has been unplugged. You can see the power is off. And if we look over here at our persistent ping, we can see that I got one request timed out, four destination net unreachables, another request timeout, and now we are pinging once again. So it successfully failed over. That probably took about five to 10 seconds. This is a much needed improvement. And I would suggest to any installers out there who are considering installing the UDM Pro Max for your clients, that you budget for two of these devices right out of the gate. I'm sure there's gonna be a ton of questions on shadow mode. And as of the version that I'm testing out now, I do have a few of those answers. And of course, this is all subject to change and evolve over time. First of all, you can't mix and match Dream Machine models for shadow mode. You have to have the same model of Dream Machine in order to enable shadow mode. However, I have confirmed with Ubiquiti that shadow mode high availability will be available for all Rackmount Dream Machine models in UniFi OS 4.0. So for example, you could have two Dream Machine Pros do shadow mode, but you can't have a Dream Machine Pro be a secondary failover to a Dream Machine SE or a Dream Machine Pro Max. Another question that I had right off the bat, how does your protect surveillance footage work with shadow mode high availability? The short answer is that your protect footage does not synchronize between the primary and secondary Dream Machine devices. But there are two options for how to handle the surveillance storage. The first option is you can just move the hard drives from the failed primary to the shadow mode secondary and then continue to record. You'd only be missing the footage from when the primary failed up to the point that you move those hard drives. Or the second option, you can keep another set of hard drives in the shadow mode Dream Machine. So when it fails over, UniFi Protect will automatically start to record footage to the shadow mode device, but it's not gonna have any of the footage from the failed primary since those hard drives are still in the old unit. So then which of these two methods would I recommend? Really, it depends on the scenario, right? For companies who want zero time lapse in recorded footage or if you're under any sort of surveillance regulations where you have to be recording at all times, then you're gonna wanna have a second set of hard drives in the failover device. But if you're okay with a lapse in surveillance footage from the time that your primary Dream Machine fails to the time when you can physically move the hard drives to the secondary, then you can get away with just one set of drives. Let's now take a look at what I would consider to be a pretty standard large business deployment using the UDM Pro Max. So here is our large unified deployment example. In this case, we have internet up here at the top. And since I'm using redundant gateways, that internet connection has to plug into both of the UDM Pro Max gateways. So you can see in this case, I'm using the 2.5 gigabit ethernet port on each device. The next thing over here, you see this green line is shadow mode. So that is the communication between the two UDM Pro Max devices or really any Rackmount Dream Machine devices that are in that shadow mode high availability. They're gonna use port seven of the eight port switch to facilitate the communication and the synchronization between those two devices. That's your heartbeat, your high availability heartbeat, if you will. Now, since this is a truly redundant setup, I have also added a USP RPS. That is the redundant power system. And you can see that that red line goes to the RPS port on the back of both of the UDM Pro Maxes. So they have standard AC power and then they also have RPS power as well. Again, just redundancy upon redundancy here in this large deployment because uptime is paramount. Now from here, you're gonna wanna distribute out, right? And so this is where you wanna have some sort of middle layer core switch. And for this example, I'm using the USW aggregation and you can see that I have two 10 gig fiber links, one from each of the UDM Pro Max gateways over to that USW aggregation. And then from here is where you can scale out to however many actual RJ45 network switches you need. In this case, I have two of the USW Pro 48 Max PoEs. They are both 10 gig connected to that aggregation. And then from here, you can have multiple aggregation switches or they have a pro aggregation switch as well that has a lot more ports. Coming out of those Pro Max 48 PoEs, we have all of our PoE powered devices such as access points, surveillance cameras, voice over IP telephones. And you can also have non PoE switches for regular client devices, right? So all of your cubicles or other servers in your network stack or whatever you need to plug into RJ45. So that's where you would scale out the rest of the network. So let's go through this one more time top down. Internet goes into the UDM, both UDM Pro Max gateways. Those are communicating with each other and synchronizing and they have a heartbeat between them on port seven of the onboard eight port switch. We have redundant power. That redundant power, by the way, can go to these other devices as well. And then we are 10 gig connected to a core aggregation switch which then aggregates out to however many standard network switches we need in our environment. All right, so there you have it. A quick overview of the brand new UDM Pro Max. Let me know what you think down in the comments. And remember, if you need any assistance designing out a network for your own home or business, Rogue Support is here to help on the web at rogue.support. And if you'd like to keep this party going, I have hand selected a couple of videos on the right here for you to watch next. The top video is my recent review of the new U7 Pro Access Point. And the bottom video is my recent trip down to Cerro Gordo, California to design a wireless network for a ghost town.
