- Joined
- Dec 22, 2003
- Messages
- 3,351
Ok, I have a network that is growing exponentially thanks to our manager's ever growing demands and insistence that people need to be able to access stuff via their iDevices/smartphones.
We've just invested in a couple of new switches (HP Procurve 5406zl 44G+POE+4SFP) and layout would physically look something like this once done:
Two physical sites on a 1Gbit fibre connection. That is non negotiable, we can't afford to add to that (it's half a mile long)
Previously we've just had about 50 switches and 3 on each side were acting as the core, trunked (link aggregation context) to eachother, serving the edge devices. With the pure amount of systems, the switches (all layer 2) started to throw a paddy, as MAC address tables went over 500 entries exceeding the limit of 8k entries (thats about 512 addresses). So they all started acting as glorified hubs. They worked, but being painfully slow at the best of times. There's about 600 network entities currently. 480 are workstations, around 40 printers, 50 switches, 10 wireless APs and the rest is just drive-by gubbins like phones, ipads etc.
So, enter the new switches. They're sat on the side waiting to go in pending decent testing.
The intention is to keep it VERY simple for now - it just needs to last until next summer when I am re-working the entire network and infrastructure. My hope is to use 2 VLANs to cut broadcast traffic right down, effectively halving the above problem. However it's just the nitty gritty. Setting up a vlan or 5 is a piece of cake. Doing it so all stations on both sites can still speak to the servers and printers seems to be a sticking point. I know you can tag the connections between switches so the right data goes to the right place but don't know if I need to have the servers/printers on their own VLANS too to achieve this. All the information available on Google is either IOS specific (thats proper IOS, none of your apple twattiness thank you!) or goes from "A network is where one or more computers or devices can connect together" to a load of jargon and gobbledegook that is far beyond even my skills to decipher.
Can anyone shed some light? There's no point telling me I'm too shit - I know this, and until we get the training budget through sometime in 2018 this will probably remain whilst I wing it. The plan is to make a proper job of it next summer when we have the run of the network (vlans for printers, wifi, servers, each site, separating DHCP for each site, transparent proxy for SITE1 etc) but until then we just need to keep it ticking over without falling over. Much.
We've just invested in a couple of new switches (HP Procurve 5406zl 44G+POE+4SFP) and layout would physically look something like this once done:
Two physical sites on a 1Gbit fibre connection. That is non negotiable, we can't afford to add to that (it's half a mile long)
Previously we've just had about 50 switches and 3 on each side were acting as the core, trunked (link aggregation context) to eachother, serving the edge devices. With the pure amount of systems, the switches (all layer 2) started to throw a paddy, as MAC address tables went over 500 entries exceeding the limit of 8k entries (thats about 512 addresses). So they all started acting as glorified hubs. They worked, but being painfully slow at the best of times. There's about 600 network entities currently. 480 are workstations, around 40 printers, 50 switches, 10 wireless APs and the rest is just drive-by gubbins like phones, ipads etc.
So, enter the new switches. They're sat on the side waiting to go in pending decent testing.
The intention is to keep it VERY simple for now - it just needs to last until next summer when I am re-working the entire network and infrastructure. My hope is to use 2 VLANs to cut broadcast traffic right down, effectively halving the above problem. However it's just the nitty gritty. Setting up a vlan or 5 is a piece of cake. Doing it so all stations on both sites can still speak to the servers and printers seems to be a sticking point. I know you can tag the connections between switches so the right data goes to the right place but don't know if I need to have the servers/printers on their own VLANS too to achieve this. All the information available on Google is either IOS specific (thats proper IOS, none of your apple twattiness thank you!) or goes from "A network is where one or more computers or devices can connect together" to a load of jargon and gobbledegook that is far beyond even my skills to decipher.
Can anyone shed some light? There's no point telling me I'm too shit - I know this, and until we get the training budget through sometime in 2018 this will probably remain whilst I wing it. The plan is to make a proper job of it next summer when we have the run of the network (vlans for printers, wifi, servers, each site, separating DHCP for each site, transparent proxy for SITE1 etc) but until then we just need to keep it ticking over without falling over. Much.
