Differences between Procurve 2626 and 2610

[kenned]

I am helping manage the network in an apartment building, that is driven on a voluntary basis with quite limited funds. We are (finally) upgrading from unmanaged to managed switches in order to separate each apartment to their own VLAN - mostly to protect from rogue DHCP servers caused by wifi routers.

The key features we are looking for is support for many VLANs (approx 80), and DHCP protection to stop rogue DHCP servers (maybe that's the ip helper feature?).

We have decided to look for used Procurve 26xx switches (24 ports) as there are quite a few of them on the local craigslist-equivalents.

There are a lot of 2626 for sale, and fewer 2610 at roughly twice the price.

I have read the specs on the 2626 and the 2610-24 models, and it looks as there are only minor differences although I guess the 2610 is a generation newer (?).

Speed-wise they are both 10/100 mbps with 1000 mbps uplinks which is good enough as they will be serving a 20-50 mbps internet connection.

They both support the Layer 2 features we need - VLAN tagging and dhcp protection/ip helper. 

For management the 2626 supports "Procurve Manager", CLI, web interface, menu interface and RS232.

I guess the same goes for the 2610, although it doesn't say the exact same things in the spec pages.

So are there any differences that I have overlooked, that could make a 2610 worth twice as much as a 2626?

[Richard Brodie_1]

No you haven't missed much. The 2626 is nearly 5 years past the EOL, at which point HP will no longer provide warranty support or bug fixes. The 2610 is EOL as well, just not so long.

The only thing that might be significant is that the 2610-24 is fanless.

2626 EOL notice: I give up trying to post a link. Google 2626 EOL.

[John Gelten]

The differences in specs between the 2600 and 2610 series are indeed in the details; generally speaking they are just different generations of the same device. One of the possibly relevant details are enhancements in the QoS options that are available.

If you want the routing between those 80 VLANs to be done by this switch, keep in mind the Layer-3 functionality of the 26xx-series is limited to only 6 routes. So, you will need an external router to support those 80 L3-VLANs (in a VLAN-trunk, probably).

Besides that, they have support for only 8 VLANs in their factory-default configuration, if you want more VLANs - even if you are just using Layer-2 VLANs, you have to override that default maximum ( max-vlans 100 ).  I havent used the 26xx-series in a setup with more than 20 L2-VLANs on one switch, but the manual says we are able to configure a maximum of 256 VLANs; I'm hesitant to go significantly over the defaul maximum, but I guess that's just me being better-safe-than-sorry, because I am supporting enterprise environments.

;-)