a friend of mine is running a small company and all their network infrastructure runs on old cisco 2960 and 3750 switches I’m trying to convince them to revise their network and I want to recommend them to run everything on opensource software .
looking around it seems best choice for firewall is OPNsense, for routing its Vyos (couldn’t find a suitable bsd based alternative ), I want to run Vyos on L3 switches too .
main question is the hardware what kind hardware should I get, not much throughput is required though; currently lots of links there are fast ethernet or gigabit at best but I want It to be scalable .
also if you can recommend me some L2 switches that can be flashed to an open source firmware (openwrt or something) It would be great.
Search for “whitebox switches”. These run custom OS’s, and are the closest to what you’re looking. However keep in mind that all the interesting stuff happens in the switching fabric, which is often proprietary. I’d also mention that white box switches are really designed for huge companies who have time and resources to write their own management platforms / automation. So in terms of usability you’ll probably find off the shelf switches are far better for a small company. (Plus those old Cisco switches are bullet proof, could probably last another decade).
I’ve never used it but this is a BSD based routing platform - https://bsdrp.net/. I’m more biased towards linux/FRR and Vyos over a BSD platform.