For a while, I’ve been looking to update the networking at the core of my homelab. I have had some great results with the current setup utilising a number of DAC’s but there were a couple of things that were annoying me.

Then MikroTik dropped the CRS504-4XQ-IN and if the price wasn’t horrendous then that was the route I was going to go to alleviate these issues. Yes, it’s 100Gb/s and only has 4 ports but that should be all I need… I managed to locate one in stock for £587 plus Vat

As you can see the switch has redundant power not often found at this price point. It actually has 4 ways to power it. 2 AC supplies, A DC input and then strangest of all it can be powered by POE in. This last point showcases how power efficient it is which is a huge win for a homelab.

My plan is to utilise the existing Intel 25Gb NICs I have and split the 100’s on the switch into 4×25. This technically gives me 16 usable 25 ports which are way more than I need. This will allow me to accommodate the TrueNAS box and the 2x Supermicro nodes I usually run for my lab. The other 2 nodes will get an upgrade at a future date.

Initial impressions are that the switch is very quiet and also incredibly power efficient. ( It can be powered just from POE) however, the config is way more complex than I have seen before. This is because it’s basically a router that can switch at wire speed. The other challenge I have had is connecting my legacy 1gb/s network. This is still a work in progress but for now, Storage and vMotion have been migrated.

I will report back when everything has been migrated.