UniFi Network 8.0 – What you need to Know

The latest update of the UniFi Network application, version 8.0, added some great new features, including a new Port Manager, Radio Manager, WireGuard VPN, and Site Overview.

The new port manager not only gives you a better insight into your network ports but also makes managing VLANs a lot easier.

In this article, we will take a look at the new port manager, and how to manage your VLANs. Also, we will take a brief look at the new radios tab.

UniFi Port Manager

The new Ports page is really a big improvement over the previous version. We already had the ports insights page, which you could access after selecting an UniFi switch. But the new port manager gives you a clear overview of all ports across your devices and gives us some useful filtering options.

When opening the port manager you will see all the ports that are in use in your network. We can select a specific UniFi switch using the drop-down/search option (1) in the top bar. And the new filter options (2) allow you to quickly filter your ports.

This way you can easily check how many PoE ports you have available for example.

If we select a device from the drop-down list (1), then we get the “old” port insights overview which was also available in the previous versions. Again, we can use the filter options to quickly filter the ports.

Ports Insights

The ports insights is a great tool when you want to optimize or troubleshoot your network. It allows you to view and compare statics between different ports on the same device. For example, in the screenshot below we compare the usage of the two access point and connect to the UDM Pro:

VLAN Management

The improvement that I am most excited about is the new VLAN management. With the new update, we can now easily view all VLAN assignments and configure ports to a specific VLAN.

Setting up VLANs, and working with tagged and untagged ports, can be a bit hard to understand at first. Ubiquiti has made it a bit easier to understand the differences with this new interface. A port is now assigned to a Native VLAN / network (for the untagged traffic) (1).

For the tagged traffic (2), we now have three options:

• Allow All – Configured VLANs are automatically allowed (tagged) on the port.
• Block All – All tagged VLANs are not allowed (blocked) on the port.
• Custom – Specify which VLANs are allowed (tagged) on the port. Any VLAN that is not specified is blocked

Good to know is that when you add a new VLAN to your network, it is automatically allowed (tagged) on all ports that are configured with Allow All.

Tip

Make sure that you read this article on how to configure VLANs for your UniFi network.

VLAN Viewer

The new VLAN viewer provides an easy way to see all the Native and Tagged VLANs on your devices. In the top view, you will see an overview of all the ports and the native VLAN assignment. As you can see in the screenshot below, two ports are assigned to VLAN 40, whereas all the other ports are natively assigned to VLAN 1 (Default VLAN).

The colors show which VLANs are allowed (tagged) or blocked on a port.

• Blue – Native VLAN Assignment
• Green – Allowed (Tagged) VLANs
• Grey – Blocked VLANs

Radio Manager

The new radios page is also a great improvement. It gives a better overview of all your access points, their configurations, statistics, and performance. It also allows you to easily select multiple access points and change their configuration.

The new filter options allow you to quickly filter all access points based on band or MIMO. And we can quickly view the configured access points per wireless network.

Wrapping Up

Besides the new port and radio manager, we can now also configure Wireguard VPN and we have a new Site Overview for all sites that use the UniFi Network Application.

I hope you liked this article, if you have any questions, just drop a comment below.