That feeling when your lavish mansion needs 48 PoE ethernet ports, a bunch of wifi access points and a central management system for that and the cameras. First world problems, amirite? 
I mean where I live I don't even need more than one AP to cover the whole area
It's a two storey semi-detached house, about 120sqm, but with lots of reinforced concrete, meaning the WiFi is overall... Bad.
That 48 ports PoE will support in total: 7 APs (Ubi's small in-wall ethernet port + AP combo), 8 cameras, 3-4 LED strips (mostly for night light usage), and hopefully the gateway modem as well. I might just go for a 24 port unit though. I'm also looking into a few smarthome tech gateways that would also be running off of PoE (ZigBee, Z-wave, possibly even UWB if we finally get some proper IoT implementations).
The idea is to future-proof the house so that any upgrades will be relatively easy to implement and not need to replace half the stack in 4-5 years.
7 APs in 120sqm would have me wondering as to the efficacy of EMF shields. I use two in considerably greater space, seems to get the job done, but then I have never encountered a WIFI issue that could not be resolved with lengths of copper.
Thank you again for your replies !! @bobafetthotmail I looked at Mikrotik, looks a better than SG108PE, but still it doesn't say in the table with squares and VLAN which ones are tagged/untagged.... and perhaps too many options;; if something else supports OpenWRT or similar by birth, perhaps it's easier for me. But I do need PoE (At least 6 Ports, not more than 9.)
Unifi Switch would be also an option for me. My current site has Unifi APs with native firmware. It was indeed difficult for me to set them up with OpenWRT (I was on very low budget for political reasons back then, I had to try things on what I already had: Frtizbox 4020), but since I figured out how it works, and I like OpenNDS more than captive portal on Unifi, bandwidth control is also better with OpenNDS, I don't feel like having all-Unifi with Unifi security gateway and Unifi Switch. (Unless someone convinces me that deep packet inspection is an important feature) But I do consider getting Unifi switch: someone in openWRT forum uses it (he got OpenWRT--Unifi Switch--Unifi APs). This way the switch GUI also shows up on Unifi Controller. Only, I don't know how it looks;; and I don't like if it configures VLANs automatically.
@fonix232: as bobafetthotmail says, with Unifi firmware update can make something stop working. There is also a recommended version to stop updating in some cases. The people in the forum are very nice and experienced+knowledgeable, but it's weird to experience repeatedly that the instruction given by a guru in the forum is right and what Unifi employee says doesn't work, or what's written there officially is wrong.
My current site is
Modem (speedport entry2) -- Raspi 4(OpenWRT) -- SG108PE -- APs (and Raspi4 with Unifi controller+openspeedtest etc.)
I plan more or less the same thing for the new site, only I want a switch like OpenWRT (and I would get a native router, not Raspi-router. And I need telephones there.) I am no longer super low budget, I can ask for money if I find something nice 
This video should answer that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYL4KAj03WU
Yeah, I understand that. But it's not that different with OpenWrt - often you find the wiki outdated, and info nuggets spread over the forum that you need to piece together yourself. But then again Ubiquiti stuff is pricy for the fancy software, while you don't pay a dime for OpenWrt.
In this case your best bet for a switch is one of the OpenWrt supported ones I linked. I ordered a Netgear GS308T that will arrive tomorrow (replacing a Zyxel GS1200-8), and since all my APs are running SNAPSHOT anyway (Belkin RT3200 did not make it into the 21.02 cutoff due to newer kernel requirement), this will match the rest of the network more closely.
@fonix232 p.s. as for all Unifi, if someone is technically challenged but still would like to see what's going on, then indeed it's nice if you can tell them "access this website, then everything is there!", instead of telling them to go to 192.168.1.1 for the router, xxx for switch, etc.
But in the end most likely you would be doing the management ? FYI Cloud-access didn't work when I was on-line using VPN. (tunnelblick, etc)
Again, neither an old laptop or a Pi have 24 ethernet ports, as requested by OP.
Also, John Deere makes nice lawn mowers, unfortunately without 24 ethernet ports.
There is proof of concept code for the rtl839x based gs1900-48, it's not merged into OpenWrt yet and will need further work before it becomes viable, but the option is there.
The ease of use part is for me 
and I'll have a fallback system for remote access (4G modem). But yeah it's much easier to tell my parents to restart just the topmost blade than trying to get them to try fixing the standalone APs and whatnot.
My 48 port will be Ubiquiti hardware running Unifi. I love OpenWrt, but in my experience the base builds are rarely stable to the level I'd be comfortable leaving it running in a house that is ~1500 miles away from me most of the time.
The Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch ES-16XP (which is actually 2 EdgeSwitch ES-8XP in the same enclosure) is supported by OpenWrt and has 16 Gigabit PoE Ports w/ 24V/48V Passive PoE. Not sure if the POE is supported however. Use https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_extended_all?dataflt[Device+Type*~]=switch to see all switches currently supported by OpenWrt.
Small update: the GS308T has arrived, and now it's running the latest OpenWrt SNAPSHOT version.
Configuration was a bit finicky since the default network settings make it hard to just slap into an existing network. VLAN1 is treated as WAN, VLAN100 is configured for LAN. But, after a day of tinkering, I can finally say I've set up all the VLANs I need (and, with the help of the existing configuration, I've also FINALLY managed to set VLANs up on my other devices as well).
Fair warning: LuCI does not seem to generate a completely valid DSA VLAN configuration at the moment. When I tried going through the web interface, the same logical setup that worked fine when manually done (via uci or /etc/config/network) simply results in a dead device that needs a factory reset to work again. This goes for both the switch, and all my RT3200's. Unfortunately I wasn't able to verify why this happened, as the moment the network settings are applied, I lose all connection, and even with file syslogging, I could not get the logs (since no network until factory reset). I might try to mount a USB drive and give it another go in the future.
And as per the wiki page of the GS108T, the ethernet port LEDs (and the power LED) are not working at all. The power LED is lit, but reacts to nothing (e.g. factory reset).
Just got a screenshot of Zyxel from a friend of mine, and saw that it got also PVID. On Mikrotek, there is also a column with "default VLAN ID" for each port. Am I right to think that it's the same thing as PVID ?
So I started to think that perhaps it just belongs to any somewhat advanced switch, that I should learn to live with it. I see on Mikrotek that it also has port isolation. It might come handy, if I want to isolate clients on different wires without creating extra VLANs.
And I really want to be sure that PoE works for about 8 ports. I am inclined to think that I should perhaps get something so that I can use the native firmware.
Now my question is, is Mikrotek or Zyxel manageable for an inexperienced person ? i.e. would it work as far as I understand the pages I need (e.g. VLAN, port isolation) and don't touch anywhere else ? The presence of sooo much configurability scares me.
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