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Procurve Solution

 
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Alan Sielbeck
Advisor

Procurve Solution

I am hoping some of you can provide a recommendation for the most cost-effective solution for our business needs.

There are 3 separate businesses sharing a common gateway, and minimal file resources between domains. Currently, we have a mish-mosh bunch of 10/100 switches linked together forming 1 network. ~115 clients are total are connected between all 3 organizations. Each organization operates their own Win2003 SBS machine. The DHCP server from 1 SBS box is providing IP info for all clients on the network.

We would like to provide more separation due to the confidentiality of information transmitted 2 of the businesses, as well as ease of management for business growth. Ideally, each SBS machine would provide DHCP info for clients on each business. The gateway would be accessible to all clients.

I was hoping I could use 5-6 procurve 1800s to accomplish this, but after reading the forums, I'm not certain this will work. Initially I thought I would create 3 separate VLANS, allow DHCP services to operate on each server, and allow all packets to contact the gateway machine. (Can a port be a member of multiple VLANS, or can a port be set to ignore VLAN tags?)

Any thoughts on an effective solution that would allow the separation we desire without breaking the bank? We do want to go with Gb switches as many of the queries on the servers are transmitting large chunks of data to the users.
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Matt Hobbs
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Procurve Solution

With your gateway machine, as long as its NIC driver supports 802.1Q VLANs (quite often you can install the necessary driver if it isn't already), then your initial idea using the 1800's should work.

The port your gateway machine connects into would be tagged for all three VLAN's, the switch to switch links would tagged for all VLAN's, and the user ports would be untagged for the appropriate VLAN they belong to.

There are plenty of different ways of going about a solution like this. You may also want to contact the ProCurve design center for recommendations - http://www.hp.com/rnd/design_center/index.htm