I recently bought a RB450G and am very pleased with it.
Initially I was looking for a CISCO Small Business SRW2024-K9-EU - SG 300-28 - 28-port Gigabit Managed Switch as a center piece for the network, being interested in the L3 routing capability for doing Inter-VLAN routing at wirespeed.
But after my experience with the RB450G I’ve checked out other products and found the CRS125-24G-1S-IN Cloud Router Switch, which would be more interesting to me that the beforementioned CISCO L3 Switch.
My question is the following: Can the CRS125 do wirespeed Inter-VLAN switching without the need of assigning ports to the full blown router, so that the Inter-VLAN routing is performed by the switch chip itself and not by the AR9344?
I’d like to use only four ports of the CRS125 for mangled/firewalled routing (and so replace the RB450G), and have the rest assigned as switchports with a couple of different VLANs.
I was checking the RB450G Switch Chip features, where there is an indication that the Atheros8316 used in that board has a “Rule Table” which “is very powerful tool allowing wire speed packet filtering, forwarding and vlan tagging based on L2,L3,L4 protocol header field condition”.
The RB450G is set up as follows:
port 1 = internet gateway in subnet 1
port 2 = subnet 2
port 3 + 4 = bridged in subnet 3
port 5 = unused
Is it possible to use the 5th port as a trunk target, using the rule table of the Atheros8316 on that port to do wirespeed Inter-VLAN routing? This 5th port would not be used to route to other ports on that router. Only on that trunk, a router on a stick.
In that case I would consider getting a TP-Link L2 Managed Switch instead of a CISCO 300 Series switch. Would that yield a similar performance? Using the 5th port of the RB450G together with a TP-Link L2 Managed Switch instead of just a CISCO 300 Series Switch with L3 routing enabled?