We've been mucking along on our twin-site network for a long time using a range of rubbish switches and a few Procurve 1800-24Gs. Some of these have been dying but HP have been fantastic in next day replacements - can't fault them!
Anyway, we've gotten to the point where IT useage is increasing massively and we expect that growth to continue. It's a relatively small network but roughly 300 devices on each site. Sites connected via 1Gbit fibre. Currently, they all feed into more of these random layer 2 switches on a flat network.
There is just too much broadcast traffic. Most the layer 2 switches are acting as hubs as they can't store the amount of MAC addresses floating around. So we needed a proper core.
We have purchased a pair of beasty 5406zl+44G+4SFP POE switches, one for each site. We don't want to do too much work until July when we can get some network downtime, but would like to improve the situation until then. My initial thought is vlan off each site which should at least kill off the unnecessary broadcast traffic over the 1Gbit link.
So a rough map followed by textual description:
As you can see, internet comes in via Site 2. We have no access or control of that router.
Each site has it's own collection of servers and printers.
Workstations must be able to access information and services from servers on both sites.
Workstations all need access to the Internet.
Workstations do not need to talk to workstations on the other site (With exception to a few, the technicians' stations) nor do they need to print to printers on the other site.
However, print server is and must remain on one site (Site 1)
Network is currently flat. IP system is 192.168.3.0/24 for all switches, wireless AP's and printers. Naturally the servers have an address in this range too.
Workstations are all on a separate range - 10.14.150.1 - 10.14.152.254. This structure must remain intact although we can happily split via DHCP if necessary (and probably wise, to stop DHCP traffic over the inter site link). All workstations with exception to the techy stations are DHCP and need to remain so for PXE/deployment purposes (currently FOG, soon to be SCCM)
Printers as said sit on the 192 range and are managed by a 3rd party application on a site 1 server.
So, we need to make this tick over ideally for 7 months.
Any suggestions on layout would be very much appreciated .
The technical side of vlans: From what I've read and learned in the last week, we need to (please correct where appropriate)
Add another VLAN (to the default_vlan) to each switch. For brevity we call them SITE1 and SITE2 on each switch.
Assign a static IP to each vlan on each switch. We've used 192.168.3.9/10 for VLAN1 and 192.168.2.9/10 for VLAN2 on each respective switch. Is this correct?
Tag the uplink/trunk ports. So the inter-site link is fibre to B24 on each switch, we tag B24 to both vlans on both switches, with the rest of the ports untagged? Do we need to do anything else to the edge switches on either site?
I keep hearing IP-Helper/DHCP Helper mentioned. Can anyone clarify the requirement/meaning of this?
The rest I'm not sure on. We need to do this with absolute minimal downtime hopefully after Christmas, hence we have a week and a half to implement a test network and, well, test! :)
I know this is quite in-depth for what should be a simple task especially as it's pretty much temporary. I've read the documentation a few times and it gets more confusing each time as all examples go way ahead of the sort of thing we need.
Again any advice would be very gratefully received.