2w ago

What is the difference between a managed switch and an unmanaged switch?

And why are managed switches so much more expensive than unmanaged ones?

7 comments

Unmanaged switches just do their thing, managed switches let you tell them what that thing is.
Unmanaged switches don't care about VLAN tags, spanning trees, management interfaces, or LACP.
Managed switches care about at least some of those features and therefore will have a management interface to configure them, as well as firmware supporting them.
A dumb/unmanaged switch will look up the MAC address of the intended recipient and map that to a port before forwarding a packet to a particular port. A managed switch might do a lot more.
If you don't need a managed switch, don't buy one. If you're OK with everything on one port being able to communicate with anything on another port, and connectivity is your only concern, you're probably going to be fine with an unmanaged switch.
Source: I manage (amongst other things) managed switches for a living.
- Would you say you're a managed switch manager? Do you have any aspirations of eventually becoming a manager of other managed switch managers? And if so, how would you manage that?
  
  I wouldn't, as managed switching is only a small subset of the managerial tasks I attend. I don't manage individual switches as much as I manage production systems where managed switch management is only a minor component.
  On that note, we actually use hubs in one particular place in these systems, and since I manage their installation and asset tracking, does this make them managed Ethernet hubs?
Unmanaged switches are extremely dumb. They do simple things, and do them well.
Managed switches have lots of other shiny features, which is why they are more expensive. They also have to be configured to enable those features, which means you have to know how to drive them
Why are they so much more expensive..
Because people will pay that much for those features. You can find managed switches for $60 pretty easily. Until you get into the 48port blades they don’t change a whole lot, so the higher prices are typically from different ways to trick you into paying more.
Some features like line rate, buffers, do add to the cost though.
you can web into a managed switch

7 comments