Cisco Catalyst 9300: Versatile, great scaling, and reliable
December 18, 2020
Cisco Catalyst 9300: Versatile, great scaling, and reliable
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
- Catalyst 9300 Series
The Cisco Catalyst 9300 series switches have become ubiquitous for in-office switching for us. While we rely on the larger Nexus switches for our datacenters, switching in the offices is handled entirely by the Cisco 9300's. These provide all office-switching for us, for phones, zero clients, videoconferencing units, servers, etc. They allow us to support multiple VLAN's per port, which works really well for us, as we have 1 port per desk at most desks. This allows us to daisy-chain our laptops or zero clients off of our Polycom phones, while still assigning the highly restrictive Voice VLAN per floor to the phone, and the workstation or zero client VLAN, to the laptop or zero clients, respectively.
- Multiple VLANs per port.
- Quick and easy assigning of different VLANs per port.
- Cisco ISE Integration.
- Trunking of VLANs between switch stacks on different floors.
- Cost. They're expensive, as is the maintenance.
- If someone is not familiar with Cisco's IOS, it can be intimidating.
- A better GUI interface would be awesome.
- Cisco is overly dependent on Java for their tools. While the universal nature of Java is appealing, it doesn't always make for great product reliability. It also makes Java client updates stressful, as you never know if a new release will break the tools.
- Reliable, effective switching. You set it up, and it just works.
- High uptime. We've never had a 9300 go down. Not once. We've had individual PSU's die, but they are all interconnected, so one or two failed PSU's in our typical stack per floor (6x 9300-48P's), really has no impact.
- Timely firmware updates. Cisco updates firmware in a timely fashion. You pay for it, certainly, but expedient firmware updates, especially when dealing with vulnerability mitigation, is absolutely critical for an Enterprise-grade switch.
Creating the various purpose-specific VLAN's on each floor on the switch stacks is fairly straight-forward, and easy to expand to new floors. It makes scaling a very straight-forward affair, with nothing unpredictable. It also makes integrating these various VLAN's into our Palo Alto firewall's security zones very simple. Everything just works. ISE allows us to enforce user-level access as well, something which we certainly could not do on our aging HP ProCurve switches.
Managing the switches is very simple and done exclusively through SSH (We use Putty). Our network team was able to get setup our multi-floor network very easily, and once the first floor was built, adding the next three was very simple, once the framework was in place. Our network team loves them, and so does the rest of IT. We have a small team, and these switches are easy to manage.
We used HP ProCurves at our old office. They offered cheap switching, lots of ports, and lifetime warranties, but you realistically got what you paid for. They were often times confounding, and much more difficult to integrate together and with our firewalls. QoS was pretty much a lost cause on them. We also had many issues with dead ports. While they were covered under warranty, having to take an entire 48 port module offline to get the defective port replaced was quite cumbersome and caused some outages.
The inability to push multiple VLAN's across a single port was also a huge impediment, necessitating two ports per cube, whereas we can accomplish the same thing with one port per desk with the Catalyst 9300's.
The inability to push multiple VLAN's across a single port was also a huge impediment, necessitating two ports per cube, whereas we can accomplish the same thing with one port per desk with the Catalyst 9300's.
Do you think Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches again?
Yes