Which enterprise equipment vendors should be avoided due to lock-in to the original organisation?
Hey there, I'm relatively new to homelabbing and all my experience thus far has been with consumer gear (including switches, routers and computers). I'm planning a move to a rack to expand my current setup and that of course comes with more questions that I could reasonably list here...
As I read some of the posts from people on this subreddit and in other, similar communities, one thing that comes up every now and then is the lock-in of the used hardware to the accounts that were used to set it up in the first place. I'm not sure if there is a term that describes this concept better, but to be explicit, what I'm referring to is the inability to use, say, a router, because to manage it I would need to sign in with credentials I don't have access to.
In particular I thought I'd reach out and ask about the feasibility of running equipment made by different vendors (or models, or ranges of models) of hardware that isn't necessarily a good fit for a DIY homelab.
I'm interested in networking gear (gateways, routers, switches, APs) as well as servers; my use-cases are mostly home media server, CI server and private self-hosting of web apps and backends (plus, of course the fun of running your own hardware). I have been looking at used equipment by brands such as Supermicro, Ubiquiti and Dell. There are a ton of posts where people share their setups running this type of gear, but there's also plenty of posts with comments suggesting that OP's equipment is made by a brand everyone should stay away from due to the "original organisation lock-in" issue mentioned above.
I hope this post doesn't come across as "lazy" and I'm more than happy to do my research once I narrow down my options, but I thought I'd start off by getting some sage advice from those of you who already went through this trial by fire and could hopefully save me (and any future readers) some pain and money on bad purchase decisions.