Hands on: I tested the Zyxel XMG1915-10EP – see how this pocket-sized switch delivers on power
This comment first appeared in Issue 356 PC Pro.
Zyxel’s XMG1915 switch relationship series target Small Business This requires a large number of multi-gabit ports at space-saving design and competitive prices. The series includes three models and we review the XMG1915-10EP, which provides high-power POE++ services.
The desktop switch measures only 250 x 104 x 27mm (WDH), and all eight 2.5GBE multi-gabit ports can be delivered up to 60W. It can be paired with a pair of 10GBE SFP+ fiber ports for high-speed uplinks. It has a good power budget of 130W, which is facilitated by the chunky 150W external power brick, which is more than half the size of the switch.
The switch uses its chassis as a radiator, and the fanless design means it remains completely silent. The management options are good: you can run it in standalone mode or connect it with Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center (NCC) service cloud Right to use.
The switch packs a lot of LEDs into its front panel, the lighting shows the system and cloud connection status, while the Tri-Color POE warns if you are close to your power budget. Each port is also assigned an LED that shows whether its connection speed is 100Mbits/sec, Gigabit or 2.5GBE.
The switch is easily deployed in standalone mode, and its local web console displays four wizards for setting the default administrator password and SNMP community name, and is configured with security features, VLAN, and Quality of Service (QOS). Not that it will involve the target audience, but the XMG1915-10MP is a pure layer 2 switch and does not provide the “Lite-L3” static routing feature in Zyxel’s larger POE switch.
Standard L2 is feature-rich, including port and protocol-based VLANs and static and LACP link aggregation groups. voip Since the switch uses a customizable organization-unique identifier (OUI) list to identify the traffic of the IP phone and automatically prioritizes it by dynamically creating a voice VLAN, the network is within its scope.
The web console’s dashboard displays detailed information about system utilization, port speed, whether or not power and overall power consumption are provided for all connected power devices (PDS). One of three power priority can be assigned to each port, so if the power draw is close to the available maximum, the power with the lowest priority will be turned off first.
Unless you plan to deploy the desired Poe IP camera With the overall PTZ feature, you’re unlikely to get close to your maximum power budget. We tested this by connecting two Zyxel Wi-Fi 6e access points (AP) and the new WBE660S Wi-Fi 7 model Plus Netgear630e ap; we saw from the web console that the overall draw did not exceed 43W, which allowed us to still use 87W.
Cloud deployment is fast. We are iPad To scan the QR code label on the switch base. Two minutes later, the switch pops up in our cloud portal and receives all our website settings, including the new administrator password.
The widget-based NCC dashboard is easily customizable, and we have added widgets to show the online status of switches and total power usage. The selection switch takes us to its monitoring page and has a color-coded view of all ports and 24-hour traffic and power graphs that can be expanded to 7 days with the optional NCC Plus license and with the Pro version By one year.
For general-purpose switch operation, Nebula provides remote access to all the same functions as standalone mode. Up to five global POE plans can be assigned to specific ports that determine when an attachment is active, and you can also disable and enable POE services on each port – very convenient to remotely start unresponsive PDs.
The compact XMG1915-10EP is a great choice for small businesses who want a large number of multi-Gigabit ports and high-power POE++ services. It supports standalone and cloud management, and is very low-priced, including an impressive range of features.
