Hello everyone. I have a small homelab (1 NAS, 1 Server and an Opensense Box) and I am perfectly happy with the Microtic 10G switch I use to connect these together. However, we organize a LAN party once a year with around 40 People present and for the past years one of the organizers always provided some old enterprise network gear. Unfortunately he can not make it this year and so I got chosen to provide the network setup this year. I work in IT but rarely with Networking gear, appart from some minor VLAN setup stuff and such, so I am not really well knowledged in Network-Hardware. I have a budget of about 200€ for a few switches, cables are available, so I thought about perhaps buying something I can use in my homelab later on as well. I have some experience with Cisco switches, at least with their commandline and I have one HP 2510G-48 and 2510G-24 already, but those don’t have a 10G uplink option.
TLDR: What is a good, cheap 24/48 port switch with SFP+ 10G as an option for at least one or two uplink ports
There are many variables to consider. You want new or used, managed/smart/unmanaged, PoE, power draw and noise levels. New will be hard to find and if you need good even harder. Read good reviews on Hasivo switches (24 port version).
Used you have many options. My recommendation is bias towards managed Brocade and Arista.
Power hungry and loud but cheap and capable Brocade ICX 6610 (checkout https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/brocade-icx-series-cheap-powerful-10gbe-40gbe-switching.21107/).
Arista 7050t is also great, doesn’t require fan mod as it has fan control it’s harder to find under 200$). there are other ICX series switches that you can do fan mod and keep it quiet.
ICX 7250 (harder to find under 200$ ) and ICX 6450 both offer 24 and 48 port versions with and without PoE)
If you going to use this just for event you probably don’t care for noise and power draw so you could get cheaper and older enterprise gear. If you planning on using this for other things and run 24/7 you need to look at power and noise. In ideal setup you would have a pair of switches so that you have redundancy high availability specially for event.