SONiC VS openwrt-dpdk

Running FOSS software on a switch is an awkward endeavor. Some switches have okay-to-decent support, mostly via OpenWRT, and you’re mostly getting VLAN control. With Ruckus or Cisco, etc, you also get ACLs, some “layer 3” capabilities, sFlow, SNMP, real support for various loop detection schemes, network mapping capabilities, possible diagnosis of cable problems, and lots more. And a configuration system that is quite a bit better than you will find in most Linux networking config software. (Although OpenWRT actually tries pretty well, in contrast to, say, Ubuntu. Sigh.)

I would not want to run a large network using OpenWRT switches. Maybe if OpenWRT took management of multiple devices seriously some day.

FWIW, in theory you can run a mostly-open Linux stack on some of the very software-defined switches, supporting OpenFlow and such. See, for example, https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC/wiki This did not seem like an easy thing to get working.

For switches? OpenWrt supports a few models toward the lower end, and SONiC support a bunch at the higher-end datacenter ToR market, but none of these options are SME production-ready like Linux servers or OPNsense firewalls.

I have all sorts of expensive and cheap hardware, personally and professionally. SoCs are SoCs, and these need to run Linux or BSD for a reason. There's plenty of big silicon running Linux, but if you know any better small silicon, by all means, let us know.

To see more of what's on offer, check Colfax (not as broad a range as they once carried) and the HCLs for the main ONI OSes, starting with SONiC.

You can scour ebay for hardware on the HCL, but they're all going to be pretty loud and power hungry. I have some hardware at work that SONiC would run on and I wouldn't want to run them at home. It looks like you can run it in containers though as described here.

SONiC on virtual machine for Windows https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC/wiki/SONiC-on-virtual-machine-for-Windows

If you aren’t going for a Cisco-specific certification I would forget about getting exclusively Cisco gear and look for any open/‘gray box’ hardware that run newer open network OSes like SONiC [0], or Pica8 [1]. The skills are transferable and second-hand hardware from a variety of manufacturers like Edge-Core, QCT, or Dell or others is available for super cheap on eBay.

The advantage here is having a wide variety of experience outside of Cisco lock-in with open software (normally Linux based, some are based on *BSDs) and the actual software license is free and open for the most part. You also will get a full linux distro with a familiar cli so you can run automation and config management code directly on the switch, which would help you learn multiple things at once. Also it doesn’t hurt that you’d get 10 gigabit, or even 100g(!), Ethernet for your homelab for super cheap :).

For your shopping, look at the SONiC hardware compatibility list [2], often you can find lots of these for cheap.

[0] https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC

I'd lean toward Edge-Core or something from a specific HCL instead of FS. Some of the other brands previously available to us have either disappeared or are being highly affected by supply-chain disruptions.

with https://github.com/Azure/SONiC but I dont have a BIN file and I am not sure that was even the right Sonic?

https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/so-you-have-500mbps-1gbps-fiber-...

The chip would need to be powerful enough to process packets to do advanced QoS (like SQM) at line-rate. However, offload is supported on MT chips, so you can still perform hardware NAT functions, just not as configurable as those other methods for traffic control.

Maybe some VPP integration into the proper distribution, instead of packages and custom compiles, would make that work.

https://github.com/k13132/openwrt-dpdk