Managed or unmanaged switches on the plant floor?
Unmanaged is fine for a machine cabinet. The moment control traffic shares a wire with office traffic, you need VLANs.
An eight-port unmanaged DIN-rail switch inside one machine cabinet is the right answer more often than vendors admit — it is cheap, it has no configuration to lose, and it fails predictably.
What it cannot do is keep broadcast traffic away from your controllers. Once a line talks to MES, or the office shares the same cabling, segmentation stops being optional.
Our rule of thumb: unmanaged inside the machine, managed at the cabinet uplink, and a documented VLAN plan before the first cable is pulled.
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