The former, EdgeSwitch / EdgeRouter (all black in color), didn't have this low of a limit. I still run a 48 port, 500W PoE switch in my main rack at home and it's got limit of 255 active VLAN.
Genuinely curious What do you need 50+ vlans for? It feels like you could have physical lans to separate or simply different subnets? It’s hard for me to imagine why you would want to aggregate so many vlans over a single physical connection?
In certain scenarios, it may be necessary to assign multiple VLAN tags to the same network port. This is particularly common in environments where devices connected to that port need access to different network segments simultaneously.
For example, a networked device in a conference room might require access to VLANs designated for both guest internet and internal company resources. In this case, the port would be configured as a 'trunk' port, allowing traffic from multiple VLANs (each identified by a unique tag) to pass through. This setup ensures that the device can communicate across different departmental or functional network segments, such as VLANs for e.g. IT, Marketing, or Sales, etc.
Using VLANs over physical LANs or different subnets is fundamentally about enhancing network management efficiency and flexibility. The core advantage of VLANs is that they allow network administrators to segment and manage the network logically without the need for physical rearrangements. This means an engineer can configure and reconfigure network segments without the need to physically move cables or hardware (or even be on-site).
This doesn’t answer the question about needing more than 50.
Even if there are 20 departments, a development, testing/qa, and production server environment, phones, printers, 12 conference rooms, a dmz, an IoT, staff, and guest wifi, backups on their own vlan, a management vlan, and multiple vpns, you would still come under 50 with a few more to spare.
If you have a network like this it might also behoove you to physically separate it out so guest infrastructure and production, and management interfaces are all on completely different devices and thus each network doesn’t need all vlans.
Unifi doesn’t sell the highest quality of equipment that could necessarily support more complex environments in the first place but needing more than 50 vlans on one physical network sounds almost unsustainable.
