Hello,
I have a longstanding discussion with some collegues I want to end once and for all.
We mainly use the HP 2530-24-PoEP Switch (J9779A) switches. Connected are a mix of devices;
- Wifi accesspoints (Aruba or Ubiquiti)
- Domotic care system for elderly people
- VoiP clienst (the domotic system als wel as the PBX and wireless phones use this)
- Private GSM picocells (NanoBTS)
- FreePBX (Asterisk) with only SIP clients (Yealink or Aastra phones and Grandstream SIP client on Android phones)
- IP camera's for video surveillance
- Access control (Suprema IP card readers)
Needless to say the network is divided in several VLANs. Every items listed abover here has a unique VLAN ID.
This works very well and until recently all different VLANs had their own switches connected to a router.
Just recently we started to use multiple VLANs on 1 switch as sometimes 1 switch only had a few ports in use. Multiple VLANs could save us a few switches on the whole installation.
Now, as we're all CCNA trained of course we started to use trunks as this is common in Cisco switched. But, we are using HP switches now.
It's my opinion that trunking in hp switched is used to do some sort of load balancing. I thinks its only needed to tag ports 25 and 26 to transport all the VLANs over multiple switches (we usually daisy-chain multiple switches to 1 router port, or we use 2 router ports to the first and last switch with spanning tree for rendundancy).
Am I right or not? For me it's working fine but some collegues persist in using trunks (trk1, trk2...etc.) and we are aiming to deliver a unified solution to all our custumers, we all have a week service duty every 8 weeks so I think it's important all clients are running a similar network.
