Trading Plastic for Enterprise Silicon: Dropping a Cisco Catalyst 3560-CG into the Homelab
· 12 min read
Hello everyone,
Between balancing work projects, keeping up with endpoint engineering tasks, and rebuilding my home lab after a recent hardware wipe, I've spent a ton of time recently looking critically at my physical switching layer. For a long time, an unassuming 5-port plastic Tenda switch sat quietly at the top of my 10-inch mini rack. It was cheap, it was quiet, and when my lab only consisted of a few basic virtual machines, it forwarded Ethernet frames without complaint. It served it's intended purpose for the time.