Netgear AV Line — Habitech Support

As you will be aware, the AV-Line switches feature in our NHD, Dante and Demo deployments in the building. I have found some limitations and undocumented issues:

Isolated VLANs do not work when there are two DHCP servers
- Although VLANs are generally easy to configure and can be adjusted with more detail from the pro interface, there is a limitation on these switches where they do not like more than one DHCP server even when the servers are isolated within VLANs and PVIDs. This is in a case where there are two distinct VLANs with independent trunk and access ports, separate PVIDs. As soon as you introduce another isolated DHCP pool the switch blocks all traffic. I have not found a fix for this.
- In the case of Apple Avenue, to resolve the issue, I used a Cambium switch to introduce several trunked and Isolated VLANs across the Area (Demo, Dante, Apple Avenue, NHD, CCTV), and I used the Netgear switch to only handle AVoIP, Dante and signage traffic.
Be wary of "Auto-LAG" and "Auto-Trunk"
- These features are great but flawed. The concept of a LAG group is that it is a great way of exponentially growing inter-switch bandwidth exponentially. It also carries the advantage that it handles redundancy and network loops. Therefore if a link breaks the LAG simply downgrades itself to functional links. NOT WITH AUTO-LAG, though!
- In our case we had a 20Gbe lag group using 2 x SFP+ between a core switch and each edge switch carrying AVoIP, Dante and other traffic. However, when one of the fibres broke to one of the edge switches, rather than failing one link in the LAG group, the switch just decided that it was no longer a LAG, deleted the group and the VLANs within it, breaking the whole showroom!
- When working on more advanced features like LAG I would encourage that we instead setup manual LAGs which do not delete and work fine.
- The same applies to Auto-Trunk. In principle this seems good, but again I have seen situation where the switches will, without reason, decide not the trunk some VLANs
Given the general ability of our customer-base, I would discourage use of advanced features in the switch interface other than the excellent "point and click" traffic/VLAN type scenarios.

Hope this is udeful to you all!

Thanks
JML

As you will be aware, the AV-Line switches feature in our NHD, Dante and Demo deployments in the building. I have found some limitations and undocumented issues:

Isolated VLANs do not work when there are two DHCP servers
- Although VLANs are generally easy to configure and can be adjusted with more detail from the pro interface, there is a limitation on these switches where they do not like more than one DHCP server even when the servers are isolated within VLANs and PVIDs. This is in a case where there are two distinct VLANs with independent trunk and access ports, separate PVIDs. As soon as you introduce another isolated DHCP pool the switch blocks all traffic. I have not found a fix for this.
- In the case of Apple Avenue, to resolve the issue, I used a Cambium switch to introduce several trunked and Isolated VLANs across the Area (Demo, Dante, Apple Avenue, NHD, CCTV), and I used the Netgear switch to only handle AVoIP, Dante and signage traffic.
Be wary of "Auto-LAG" and "Auto-Trunk"
- These features are great but flawed. The concept of a LAG group is that it is a great way of exponentially growing inter-switch bandwidth exponentially. It also carries the advantage that it handles redundancy and network loops. Therefore if a link breaks the LAG simply downgrades itself to functional links. NOT WITH AUTO-LAG, though!
- In our case we had a 20Gbe lag group using 2 x SFP+ between a core switch and each edge switch carrying AVoIP, Dante and other traffic. However, when one of the fibres broke to one of the edge switches, rather than failing one link in the LAG group, the switch just decided that it was no longer a LAG, deleted the group and the VLANs within it, breaking the whole showroom!
- When working on more advanced features like LAG I would encourage that we instead setup manual LAGs which do not delete and work fine.
- The same applies to Auto-Trunk. In principle this seems good, but again I have seen situation where the switches will, without reason, decide not the trunk some VLANs
Given the general ability of our customer-base, I would discourage use of advanced features in the switch interface other than the excellent "point and click" traffic/VLAN type scenarios.

Hope this is udeful to you all!

Thanks
JML

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