Noob: Assistance with vLAN basics across multiple 2900-24G

[Stevehoot_1]

Hi all,

I have a Dell PowerConnect 6248 L3 switch (don't ask!), with two HP 2900-24G's connected off the Dell via CX4.

This way I have a L3 switch on each server rack in a server room. (I have another server room that is connected to the Dell via 10Gig fiber but that's not really relevant at the moment)

As the Dell UI sucks, I've started off playing with the Procurve's. So far so good - I have 4 vLAN's setup and working on a single 2900 fine. However the vLAN's need to span across the network, not being restricted to just a single physical switch.

So I have vLAN1 and vLAN2 on switch1. They have unique IP's (obviously!).

My question is how do these details get "replicated" to other switches? E.g. I could manually create the same vLAN's on the other switches (such as name, tag, IP etc.), but obviously the IP address would need to be unique - thus then creating more problems as each vLAN would have different default gateway's depending on the physical switch the nodes are plugged into!

So do the switches need to be setup as a stack instead? Would the vLAN information then be cascaded/replicated onto the candidate switches from the commander? So the Dell switch would be the commander, I would define the vLAN's there and the vLAN information would then be cascaded down into the two ProCurve's?

Hope this makes some sense!

Cheers,


Steve.