Finding information online about chaining multiple of the new Unifi Switch Ultra at this point in time is nothing. So I thought I would post my experience doing this very thing hopefully helping others having a similar use case.
My use case is a home setup that includes two Unifi US-8-150W (130W budget) Gen1 switches that connected using a SFP cable. They have worked great for the last 5 years, but living in Florida I deal with random outages that last 1-2 minutes. These outages seem to happen monthly and especially in the rainy season having frequent lightning; note the outages are short, but enough to cause my Internet to be out for at least 5-7 minutes while it recovers. This shuts down my Unifi router, CloudKey Plus, and and other services. While it tries to recover smart switches all over my home and other smart devices struggle to reconnect and sometimes get screwed up.
Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of a rack. Instead I have to deal with a Legrand OnQ-42 (42 inch) media enclosure, so space gets tight. The US-8-150W switches take a lot of space, so I could not fit a UPS inside the cabinet. Then Unifi came out with the Ultra switches, and this solved all my issues. I found the USW-U-60W (52 watt budget) provided plenty of power to run the number of Unifi cameras and other PoE things I had. Swapping out the Ultra switches was easy, and I reclaimed a lot of space so I could add a CyberPower SL700U Standby UPS which gives me 66 watt hours that can run my 2 new USW-U-60W switches, Unifi UXG-Lite gateway router, a 1 CloudKey Plus gen2, and a Pentair adapter for the Pentair ScreenLogic pool controller for at least 1 hr to 1.25 hrs and 15.
Chaining the USW-U-60W was simple,
- Unifi UXG-W – plugin → rear port 8 on USW-U-60W Ultra Switch 1
- Unifi USW-U-60W Ultra Switch 1 (front port 1) – plugin —> USW-U-60W (rear port 8)
I only loose 1 port on switch 1, but that is a great trade off for the space savins, uses much less power, and so far the level of heat is at least 80% less!! All WIN WIN.
I am including a diagram of my setup. I hope this helps anyone with a similar use case.
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