5 reasons you should buy a network switch for your home lab

If you’re even remotely into computers, you must have heard of switches. By allowing you to connect all your devices within a network, switches serve as handy additions to any computing setup. But their real utility comes into play once you start dipping your toes into the world of home labs and server management – and here are five reasons why you should integrate them into your server environment.

5 Ports galore

Because there’s no such thing as too many ports

Most consumer routers feature anywhere between two-to-four Ethernet ports, with some of the more expensive options bearing as many as six connections. For the average computing setup, a four-port router should be more than enough. But you’ll need at least twice as many ports in a dedicated home lab environment.

For starters, your server system, NAS, PCs, SBCs, and laptops can easily choke all the ports on expensive routers. Once you start adding IOT devices to your network, it becomes clear why 24-port switches are quite popular in the home lab community. And that’s before you start dedicating multiple ports to the link aggregation facility…

4 Support for link aggregation

It’s the only good type of “LAG”

Despite being available on premium switches, link aggregation is a neat feature that lets you run multiple Ethernet cables between two devices and aggregate them into a single logical link. Besides boosting the bandwidth of your connection, LAG enhances the load balancing and port failover provisions of your home lab.

On a simple server, running cables in link aggregation mode may seem a tad overkill. But once you expand your arsenal of home lab paraphernalia, you may require certain devices like NAS and storage servers to operate 24/7 – and using switches compatible with LAG technology will help you achieve just that!

3 Better PoE provisions

Perfect for smart home devices

PoE or Power over Ethernet is a fantastic technology that lets you supply both power and data through a single Ethernet cable. If you’ve outfitted your house with multiple surveillance cameras, access points, and PoE-compatible SBCs, a PoE switch can be a godsend as it halves the number of cables you’ll need for all the devices.

Plus, PoE-supported switches provide monitoring capabilities for the devices connected to them, and let you turn the devices on or off over a remote connection.

2 VLANs for your IoT devices

A great way to keep cyber invaders at bay

Security is one of the biggest issues with IoT gadgets and smart devices. Since IoT systems are connected to your home network, it’s possible for hackers to gain entry into your network by exploiting a vulnerability on a device with outdated firmware.

Managed switches supporting VLAN technology let you segregate a single network into multiple sub-networks. This way, you can relegate IoT gadgets to a single virtual network and configure separate firewall rules for them. Meanwhile, the rest of your computing devices can be grouped under a different VLAN to keep them safe from network breaches. Another plus point of using VLAN switches is that they can simplify the process of classifying all your devices, as you can group devices with similar properties and use cases into the same virtual network.

1 Faster Ethernet support

Who doesn’t like 10GbE speeds?

Most routers in the consumer space tend to cap at 1GbE Ethernet ports. While the 1 Gigabit standard has remained the norm for years, it’s not fast enough when you’re building a powerful home server.

Of course, there’s no need to go out and upgrade your home network to a 10GbE connection (even though there are cases where you might want to do just that). But a switch with 2.5GbE or ideally 5GbE capabilities can help tremendously in complex virtualization workloads and storage servers equipped with high-speed SSDs.

Boosting your home lab’s capabilities to the next level with powerful switches

There’s no denying that switches are almost necessary when establishing a home server for your tinkering and DevOps needs. But if you have the same crippling addiction to slotting all your systems into a switch as I do, you’ll find your house covered with cables. So, it’s a good idea to check out some common cable management practices to avoid turning your house into an unorganized mess of wires.

On a more serious note, switches are also some of the most expensive components in any home lab setup. As such, I recommend doing adequate research and keeping future upgradability in mind before you shell out hundreds of dollars on a switch.