Let me preface this with saying thank you and yes this is one of those questions where 'it depends' and it has multiple answers. Just looking for some other opinions.
So when architecting a L3 switch for a customer. Lets say we are working with smaller businesses - maybe 'medium' businesses. These guys may have a couple of VMware hosts with a handful of VMs on them. Standard windows environment. A couple of physical servers and maybe a few remote sites over a VPN tunnel or MPLS circuit. Maybe 300 +/- users at the corporate office and maybe 25-30 users at remote sites. Also running VoIP at all locations.
Now - when selecting L3 switches for these guys - lets say they are refreshing an old stack of 3750's. Let's say even though they are not a huge company, they want things like EIGRP for circuit load balancing and 'instant' failover. They have two circuits out each facility for this load-balancing and redundancy. Uptime is important to them.
So assuming all of that - how would one consider different layer 3 switches? What do you guys look at? I could see a potential of a 3850 or a 4500X. If they need a lot of fiber I like the 4500X as it is roughly the same price as a 3850 (assuming IP services licensing here for the EIGRP). The 4500X gives you better scalability as it is all 10G. now you can put 1G SFP/Copper gbics in this thing if needed. a 3850 is great if a company doesn't particularly have a lot of fiber or need for 10G. the 3850 can have 4x10G ports per chassis. The 4500X is a 'beefier' switch but I guess it really comes down to fiber vs copper ports.
I have recently come across the Nexus 3K. Particularly the N3K-C3048. This guy can come with the LAN-Ent license for EIGRP and is a good amount cheaper than a 3850/4500X. It has copper ports and 10G uplinks. This begs the question of why not use the N3K-C3048 as a L3 switch for a company like this since it can perform as good or better than the 3850/4500X and is cheaper?
So in a nutshell - N3K vs C3850 vs C4500X. Who/what/when/where/why? :)
Thanks for the help.
