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Advice
Currently have an Asus ZenWifi XT9 and an Asus RX-RP58 AP that I got for free and will be converted into just APs following the purchase. The lab is growing quickly, and I'd like to start having more control over everything.
Home Internet: 1G symmetrical fiber
I have a Dell N3048P 48-port switch stack that I'll be setting up soon that I also got for free. If they weren't free, I would have probably gone with Juniper EX3300's that I could have also gotten for free, but the Dells came first. 2 for redundancy, these and the soon to be new router are the heart of the lab. With these having 10G SFP+ ports, having that as an option to play with fiber uplinks all the way to router is a plus for me.
Being able to VPN in and segregate the lab, guest network and private network with VLANs is also a want. I certainly plan on hosting PLEX, Game Servers and being able to access my soon to be GNS3 lab from anywhere without too much of a performance bottleneck and trying to have some good security practices in place!
More advanced firewall options than consumer grade "all-in-one home routers" is a plus as it's certainly my weakest link in my networking knowledge. This purchase is both to improve my home network AND to expand my knowledge. I have plenty of experience being balls deep in CLI and digging into equipment I have 0 experience in so any of that isn't a worry, just want to ensure my own personal research has led me to a device that at least for now, I won't regret purchasing. Thanks for any insight as my knowledge of prosumer gear isn't super great.
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Why not RB5009 ?
Huh, completely missed that one in research. Seems like it's everything a 4011 is + an extra small goody basket of features. Thanks for pointing that out
I'm not sure how aware of this you are, sorry if I'm saying the obvious, but you should know any Router from Mikrotik comes with the same RouterOS. There's no feature lock (unless you want more than 200 VPN tunnels lol). You REALLY have to try to be able to saturate a CPU on a more modest router, even a hEX or something (best I've been able to do is saturate inter-VLAN trafic with 80+ firewall rules, and even then it was around 300Mbps).
TL;DR : choosing a product really only means choosing your needed hardware. If you don't need 10G+ and other features like that, best is to keep it simple and cheap, imho.
Nah it's not like that with enterprise gear at all. Used to needing a 10k license here, extra 20k on this gear here etc to get features so that's a completely new concept to me. That's very good to know though, appreciate it