Juniper EX Series Switches

The reliability of these switches has been excellent. All switches fail eventually, but ours have been running for years with only an occasional failure here and there. We run the EX 3300 and 4300, with some older 4200s in non-critical locations. The CLI and Juniper OS is straightforward and basic tasks such as switching a vLan are easy to learn. We particularly appreciate the show configuration | display set command that shows the actual setup text to configure all the ports. This makes it easy to configure replacement switches or configure ports. We have all the web GUI features turned off which eliminates the bulk of cyber threats, and just administer via the CLI. Since we don't need any SDN or special features we are very happy running the older switches, and find them at very attractive price points on the resale market. For small offices, we like the 8 port fanless POE model (e.g. 2300).

* Cheaper than Cisco * Ethernet / Fiber Switchports are physically robust * Rollback function on Firmware is a massive plus to Juniper in general * Juniper Support are quick to respond and dedicated to resolve issues

JunOS makes a difference in all this. Their upgrades, bug fixing, and support truly impressive.

Some of the 48 port older models are very loud due to fan noise. (e.g. the 4200's)

* Frequent Cold Boots (whether intentional or from an incident) can quite easily cause corruption on the Switch's config - although a majority of software/devices warn this, it seems to be more prevalent here * Power Spikes are the killer of these devices - they seem to be very sensitive in almost any fluctuation of power - goes hand-in-hand with frequent Cold Boots; spikes need to be avoided at all costs * Airflow inside the EX2300 (compared to EX2200) has changed for what seems to be a less-efficient path for hot air removal, and for some could mean a few changes in the Rack * EX2300 model has a power button on the front of it that if held for too long will factory reset the device - as a network engineer, this is no issue but when a non-engineer doesn't know this and tries troubleshooting the device (ie: at a store rack) then this becomes a long night's work very quick * Every firmware revision has a MASSIVE list of bugfixes, and changes, and it's common to find situations where something (eg: Automation) will work with an older version but no longer with a newer version for whatever reason; searching through these changes can be a difficult task to find those nuances

These devices make noise and when it comes to power jerk they want continuous power backup or some model lost the configurations or POE output.