If you are seriously asking for guidance then you need to indicate the requirements.
Without a sense of what the equipment is being used for, load, etc your request is not worth the paper its printed on (or the dots on the screen).
The workload is a campus with labs (800 students). The network will be used by teachers and students. The HPE-ARUBA models were proposed to the customer in the first post.
Those would be oversized to needs.
I am looking for mikrotik products that can fill the role.
@mike19, what you basically ask people here (who ar more or less guaranteed to know the Mikrotik product line but not necessarily other vendors’ ones) to do is to google up the parameters of the Aruba gear and suggest equivalent Mikrotik products. If I wanted an advice like this, I’d state the actual requirements (number of ports and their required bandwidth/media, expected routing throughput, required topology, evtl. mandatory support of particular routing protocols etc.).
Also, 800 students on a U.S. university may have different expectations than 800 students on an Indian high school.
Concur this sounds like a university student attempting to work on an assignment and not a professional IT person actually doing work related activities.
So, your customers actually wants to save money, saw MikroTik switches and thought "Hey, that 10G switch has the same amount of switchports as the Aruba on, but only coast 1/20 of it?).
Please: No! MikroTik switches do not provide the same layer 2 nor layer 3 features as Aruba/HPE
If the customer wants to save some money, he should look at ebay.com:
HPE 5500-HI switches with and with without PoE+ support, stacking support, MPLS/VPLS, fully routing+VRF at IPv4 and IPv6, working for us for years without any problems: 100$ - 200$ a piece.
Regarding access points: Grandstream GWN7660 work well for eduroam and dynamic VLAN assignment for internal/external eduroam clients.
@mike19
I suggest that you take a serious look at the TP-Link Jetstream line of switches and the TP-Link EAP660 HD Access Points combine that with the Omada network controller and you will have a very good system for your 800 students etc.
TP-Link switches are easy to use, but depending on model do not receive updates that long.
Back to topic: You´re talking about a campus. So what is the current design of the network? What about layer 3? Static routes or something dynamic? I myself use low cost switches (Netgear ProSAFE GS700, ZyXel GS19xx v2) for powering PoE based devices. For layer 3 I use the big ones.
The most important fact is that their business class switches are outstanding … they work and work and work without interruption assuming a proper IT environment.
The TL-SG1428PE is a good example for a strange product development. As you can see on the support homepage there are 4 different Hardware revisions, each with a separate firmware file.
TP-Link is not business, it’s considered low budget. Hint: Create a new topic at https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/, provide a network design (layer 2/3, buildings) and Numbers, tell your budget and you will receive more useful answers.
Regarding mentioned Aruba switches, all of them are stackable and support MLAG. MikroTik does not support any stacking at all.
Yes, which is why I recently replaced one of my 10-port TP-Links with a hEX, since it would no longer speak with modern clients over SSH for remote admin due to lack of a common ciphersuite. (6 ports was enough for this application.) I recall also having trouble getting it to speak HTTPS properly for much the same reason: ancient SSL versions, poor ciphersuites, weak X.509 certificate handling, etc.
I’ve never used TP-Link in large-scale deployments, but from my perspective down here at the home user level, I’m boggling at these recommendations of TP-Link switches over Mikrotik. Set all the L3 stuff aside and focus only on their common elements, and it’s my impression that MT does everything better, with better support. Then add all that in, and I can’t see why anyone would buy TP-Link for managed switches.
Dumb ones, sure.
Wireless stuff, no problem.
But L2/L3 managed switches? Doesn’t MT have them beaten handily? For my purposes, they sure do.
If the objection is that TP-Link web UIs are simpler than RouterOS, then why not recommend use of SwOS instead? From what I’ve seen of the differences, MT should beat TP-Link on that basis as well.