 So I have a Unify Gen 2 switch right here. This is their basic Unify USW24 PoE. This is like the base model 24 port PoE switch on the Gen 2 series. Now this is the one that only has two, on the side, two SFP ports, not SFP plus, so it's not a 10 gig switch. It's just standard 1 gig SFP. 24 ports and 16 of these ports are PoE 802.3AT PoE plus ports. So this is not their high wattage 1, but this is like the base model. This is roughly less than $400 for this switch. It's a standard Unify switch except for its their Gen 2. So softer wise, as of right now, not a lot of things have changed. I say as of right now because on their website they do note that yes they are going to be supporting, or going to in a future release, no date release for this of when or if for sure this will happen, but it does say on their website they will have layer 3 support. So they're going to add more functionality later. Apparently the hardware supports that the software hasn't caught up, which is sometimes an issue with the Unify software because if you follow some of their other similar models that are on the edge line, they appear to be using a lot of the same hardware, but the Edge OS offers more features than the Unify OS when it comes to certain functionality. Back to the switch. The significant change is going to be this right here, this little display that they have in the front and we'll cover that in a second because first thing I want to do is take it apart. So it's unboxed and the box is insignificant really. A little bit different packaging. It's still well packaged. Came in this little fabricy stuff that they come wrapped in. It came with some rack gears. Came with the bolts to hold the rack gears on and a couple rack nuts to mount this in the rack. And the cage nuts. The little squeezy ones, so nothing too significant there in the box. Came with a power cord with a little rubber band to hold it on. So power cord and a book that I'll never read. I prefer to read it online because this is in like 6-point font. So I mean cool that it came with this little pamphlet that has some basic instructions on it, but yeah it's definitely, make sure you get your glasses out to read it if you're as old as me. But all the screws are sitting next to it already along with the screwdriver. And I guess I right away want to see what's inside because a significant change on the Gen2 switches besides potentially offering more features at a later date when software catches up is these are passively cool. This particular model is, I don't know if every one of them is, but they did a lot of cooling changes to make these run cooler. Now we tested this, we've already loaded the firmware, updated it, had it running, plugged a few things in and yeah, it doesn't really seem to get near as warm as the previous Unify line of switches. And we've had, we have seen out in the field Unify switches start to overheat. I think we've, for as many of you saw, it's a super low amount of them, but we have seen them get pretty hot inside of a rack when they're crammed in with some other switches and that caused some problems. But let's take a look at what they're doing here for cooling. So like I said, there's no fans inside of this. We just have a large heat sink here. Heat sink, heat sink, two smaller ones. The SFP doesn't have any extra cooling around it here, but no big deal. Heat sink, heat sink for the power supply unit, powered right here. The little separate board for the display in the front, but yeah, not much else to it. It's a really simple setup inside and not even spots to plug in fans, no fans at all on it. So you know, get your standard power plug coming in here. I'll just lift it up here at the back and then in the front, just take a look at the ports. We have the 24 ports with the ones marked for PoE with the little markings on them, which is the first. So we have one through 16, our PoE, and then these last ones over here are just standard ports, no PoE options, and we'll dive into this as soon as we boot up the switch. So nothing real significant to report in terms of that. It still feels really well made. It's metal, not plastic. So this and of course the cover for it, all metal, which probably helps some with the cooling, slips on pretty easy, taking it apart, not a problem at all. So that was not difficult to get off. It did have a little tamper proof thing on one of those screws. So when I peeled it off, had a little unified thing that came apart. When I peeled it off to let people know that you're opening it up, I guess. So to my knowledge, that does not void the warranty. They can't do that anymore, where they say you can't look inside things you own. If I own it, well, if you own it, you own it. Man, I take it apart. I want to know what's inside many of the things I own. I like to look inside of them and get the idea of the design. So going together, like I said, pretty simple, I'm going to do this, and then we're going to boot it up and show you that little display on the front, because it's pretty neat. So the switch is plugged in and the first thing you notice is it's booting. I like that feature. It also tells you if it's updating, which we've already got the firmware updated on this. But the first one is the boot, and it's got those circles. So as the circle draws around, we know the switch is getting ready, and almost done, and it's booted. So once you have the switch booted, you can start gathering a little information on it. We only have one thing plugged in. So you can sort them without having to swipe through. We can see that one through 12, this is the one that's plugged in, and we can drill down. Whoops. Down port two is up. So you can see the data flowing back and forth on there. So you can see what it's doing. Link PoE plus one gig, and you can start going through all the other ones are down. And we can swipe back this way to get through there. We can hit the information. Here's the IP address that it has, the uptime on the switch, hardware info, version number, and we'll swipe back over here. Go here and we get some throughput stats. What's on port two? Load, system load, PoE load. Last seven days. And away we go. Swipe back. And go over here. We have some options to actually set this. We can change the color. Maybe that's a nice color, nice ubiquity blue. Swipe this way. Status, link down, etc. SFP information. So pretty basic. And also it does go off after times. You just touch it once to turn it back on and touching the center does that. The screen works great. It is kind of small, but I'm okay with this. It doesn't need to occupy a lot. The display is really nice and it's kind of a nice way to gather some info on a switch. So having this in your rack being able to swipe over without having to log into the software and kind of see something at a glance. Now it doesn't let you make any port changes. So don't worry about security. But obviously there is some security concerns. This one has physical access to your switch. They can obviously do some damage, but there's no worry about them, you know, touching this and someone goofing up a setting because it doesn't, other than they could obviously turn the brightness down on this and maybe cause a headache for you or change the color. Maybe that would bother you. There's not changes that can be made on the switch. Go back here. And that's it. There's nothing, nothing they can really change on it. But I really like the display. It's definitely a novel feature they have on here. Alright, so we're in the software. This is a 5.1235 controller version. I have the Gen2 switch opened right here. And for the most part, it looks like your standard UniFi switch. There's not anything in here. But I did think this was odd that it's missing a temperature sensor. I don't know if the sensor exists around the board and it's just not picking it up because there's not a software update for it or it doesn't exist at all. So I thought that was a little bit odd. And this is version 406610832. It's the firmware. It's the latest one as of right now in December of 2019. We'll go over here to config. There are settings on here to use site settings for the screen on or off. So you can disable the screen if you want in the front screen brightness. Use site settings or override it. Use site settings, override. That's the timeout on there. So nice that there's some options that you can do some configuration on on the particular screen on there. As far as other services go, the same support that I've seen on other UniFi switches. They didn't really seem to change anything significant in here. You look under tools or even here, there's really nothing added that makes this anything special or standing out unique. I think most of it's a design change in terms of the hardware, less about the software being that much different. In terms of the PoE and we'll edit one of the PoE ones. We get the PoE options, Mac filtering, switch profiles just like you can do on other switches. We have PoE on or off, switching, mirroring. I don't see an option to force PoE on for passive mode. That does appear to be missing. It does support port isolation, unicast, multicast, LODP, topology change notification and egress rate limiting. So we'll go ahead and cancel out of that. And lastly, we'll take a quick look at their page just to talk about the different models that are out there and what's the exact one this is. So the quieter is the song and dance we're doing right here. So Gen 1 versus Gen 2 sound level. And the switches running next to me and obviously we know fans, there's no noise. So that's going to be definitely nice feature for those of you that want this, especially if it's a small lab or running in a closet that's close to your ears or your home lab especially. Less noise is great. You don't need one more thing making a bunch of noise. They're showing off their touchscreen display. This particular model is this one right here, US 24 PoE. Then they have the pro series here that are the higher wattage. This is only a 120 watt power budget versus these are 450 and then the US Pro 48 is going to be a 660 watt. So definitely you you bump up of course and with that bump you get the price. This one sells for $379. You jump up to $699 but for $699 you are getting two 10 gig ports on there and you get four SFP plus ports on this. So for $1100 you're going to get four 10 gig ports versus the two and versus you go all the way down here. There's no 10 gig. There's only SFP standard ports on there. And once again the right here is where they say available at a future software layer three switching capabilities available in a future software release. So that's the one thing about it is no it doesn't support it right now in a future software release that doesn't have if there's a roadmap and someone has a link to it I googled I didn't find I've seen lots of people speculating if I didn't see anything from Unify Officially with the release date is for it maybe I overlooked it so feel free to leave a comment and let me know if there is a release date for one that features coming. This would be pretty cool if it had that type of layer three routing features on there and maybe I should do a video on why those matter and when you should use them when you shouldn't because I know it becomes a little bit of confusion of some of that but nonetheless being quiet I do like being the fact that it's better thermally managed definitely a plus I have not had enough of these installed yet out in the field we've talked to a few people that had them they haven't had any problems with them but you know I trust Unify on this we've had it overall our experience with the Unify hardware has been really solid so this is a welcome addition though because other than you know I've seen some of them get kind of hot and we had only one of them I can think of ever that had a real weird issue that moving it down to a spacing it fixed the issue by cooling it off a bit but it was kind of hot in that place anyways and you know that can be an issue if you have a server room or a closet where everyone shoved everything and there's no good air circulation that's not good for any of the hardware involved because you don't want all the fans running it full tilt to cool off the equipment but I'll leave links where you can get this and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to www.forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos that are accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time