I had a job interview a couple days ago and the subject of Juniper EX series switches came up. Basically the interviewer had some EX devices gathering dust in a closet, having found them unreliable.

I'd say he was being a tad harsh, but then he needed a super-high-availability environment instead of a garden variety corporate LAN, and so his judgment was appropriate. In retrospect:

- Stacking devices into a virtual chassis is overrated. The EX virtual chassis is still buggy, and will probably be buggy forever. This is actually true of every manufacturer. Everyone's stacking is buggy.

- Instead, standalone boxes, with bog standard routing or trunking between them, will work just fine, and the relatively low cost of Juniper's 10Gb optics can make up for the lack of a 64Gb VC backplane interconnect.

- Juniper tech support is mediocre. They possess a gatekeeper mentality, and don't have much authority to fix your problem. Open a P1 support case, and tech support will try to convince you to reduce the priority. Stand firm - if you have a down building, open a P1 case and insist that asses be kicked until you have a point patch in hand to fix your bug.

- Avoid calling tech support by keeping your configs simple and your protocols standard.


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