D-Link DGS-1100-08PV2/B - 8-Port Gigabit PoE Smart Managed Switch with 8 PoE Ports, 64W PoE power budget, 802.3af/at, VLAN support, layer 2 features, QoS, 802.3az EEE, Fanless - UK power cord only

I bought this to extend our network and add a couple of wireless access points without having to rewire any more than was necessary. The APs are power over ethernet (PoE) and there's no power in that part of the suspended ceiling, so a switch that was PoE itself and could pass that power through to whatever's plugged into it was a big help.Installing this switch was as simple as plugging it in. A moment later, the APs were visible on the network and all was well.

I've used many switches from the DGS-1100 range including this -08v2, as well as: -05PD, -08P, and -24Pv2. All have a similar webUI and are easy to configure and manage, once you know the default IP is 10.90.90.90. These switches offer line-rate performance on all ports and in my experience are completely reliable and have very low power consumption.The port stats and cable test features are useful to check cabling issues.My go-to switch.

I wanted a small 5-port managed switch initially to monitor network traffic by mirroring the traffic to a monitoring port, and later for use with an OpenBSD-powered Raspberry Pi WireGuard client gateway (see attached pic). The latter uses VLANs to effectively add one or more Ethernet ports to the Raspberry Pi and is easier much higher performance in my experience than using USB Ethernet adaptors. I found WireGuard throughput was limited to 100Mbit/s with an Ethernet adaptor but this rose to 200Mbit/s using VLANs and the D-Link switch. It could be even higher but my Internet connection is limited to 220Mbit/s !The switch has worked perfectly in both roles and was very easy to set up, the only gotcha being the need to reduce the default bridging VLAN1 to one port only first so as to allow ports to be allocated to the untagged VLANs. I used eth1 as the VLAN trunk link to the RPi, eth2 for the Internet connection and eth3 for the internal network.An added benefit is that the switch is 5V-powered so can be run off a multi-output USB power brick (see attached pic) with the purchase of a separate USB-to-5.5/2.1mm plug (pin +ve) cable.

Metal-bodied switch which has all the spanning tree, VLAN, QOS & port monitoring & mirroring features of the similarly priced TP-Link TL-SG108E and Netgear GS108Ev3 & GS308E switches but in a slightly smaller form factor. It also has much more detailed configuration of features (IGMP, STP etc.) at per-port/per-VLAN level and additional control over dedicated management, surveillance & VoIP VLANs.

It came quite quickly and so far has performed very well!

No regrets or disappointments. Exactly what I expected. No more, no less.

Easy to setup and management features are ready to use

I bought this managed switch to enable me to use link aggregation on my Asustor NAS. However, I found it important impossible to access the settings as use have to use an IP Address that is nut in the normal range for the router and gave an error when entering it. Despite hours spent on the internet trying to find out how to access this different sub-net I eventually gave up and tossed the switch away. The instructions were impossible for a non-expert to follow. I am not a novice with computers and can normally figure out what needs to be done eventually with a bit of research but this completely stumped me. They should understand that, although not many non-experts will want a managed switch, there are occasions where interested amateurs want to use it for a purpose like link aggregation or a VLAN and they should make the instructions capable of being understood by someone other than an IT expert.