Unifi High Availability at an Enterprise Location

Unifi recently launched its Enterprise Campus Switch Core and Enterprise Campus S switches, both of which feature 100Gb/s ports and impressive backplanes. This level of switching appeals for large environments like college campuses and large offices. But are Unifi's Enteprise offerings any good in real world scenarios? Well, we had the chance to test at least some of this for a customer with a large setup, and I have to say it works rather well.

This particular customer has a 3 floor office building with two EFGs in High Availability mode, two ECS Aggregation Switches and 16 Enterprise Campus 48 PoE. The site uses the ProXGS access points for WiFi and has an extensive Unifi Protect camera network. The users regularly hold a lot of Teams calls and video calls, and they have a number of laptops with large OneDrive volumes that regularly sync. All told, its a pretty demanding environment and definitely counts as enterprise.

There is a LOT of wiring involved, and we replaced a lot of old equipment, so we used color-coded patch cables to make VLAN identification easy. Oh, and the etherlighting on the ports definitely helps.

The setup for the EFG Shadow Router (Unifi's version of VRRP) was easy, although we found out the hard way you need to set it up from the Owner account, AND make sure you have VLAN 1/Allow All on all the ports on the EFG when you start (you can change them later). To test this, we started a Teams video call, then unplugged the primary EFG in the middle of it while running a continuous ping to the internet. We dropped 3 packets, but really didn't notice any changes on the video call. Plugging the EFG back in, it shifted back to the primary with zero issues.

Every 48 port PoE switch had an MC-LAG as its uplink, with each ECS-Aggregation supplying an uplink. I found the MC-LAG setup takes a lot longer than expected, and you really need to wait the 7-10 minutes to ensure it sets up before you plug in cables. Once it was running, we unplugged power on the ECS Aggregation while running a Teams video call and a continuous ping to the internet. The video call froze for maybe one second, and we lost 4 pings, but the MC-LAG held fine and everything moved on. While it was noticeable to us, it likely would have been unnoticed by normal users.

If you're looking for enterprise hardware at a more budget-friendly price, the enterprise switches and routers from Unifi would likely fit your bill. Drop us a line at sales@snowyowlsecurity.com and we'll be happy to send you a quote!