hodgepodge and confusion

[mstrmp3]

We have initiated a new MPLS to connect our outer offices for VOIP and centeralized data/internet. I have just completed the VOIP part and all outer oiffice phones are connected to our main office PBX and working fine. My question for now is our main office.

I need to accomplish two things.

1.Right now we are on an old DSL connection but I need to move it to the new WAN connection provided by our MPLS provider

2. I am positive I have made some configuration mistakes in the HP switches (all though evetything seems to work for now) but I need to make sure I'm not doubling or tripling my efforts just to get it to work.

I have a 'hodgepodge' of switches now. (see attachment)

One a5210-24G attached to the servers

One 2510G-48 attached to all our pc's

two v1910-G-POEs for the phones and PBX (I ran out of ports so I had to get two)

and one E4210-9-POE for a separate building for one phone and one pc.

My issue stems from not knowing how (or the best way) to get all the switches to pass all vlan traffic between each other.

1. I see a "VOICE VLAN" setting in all the switches, but have not used it.

2. I can ping one of the phone switches from the 2610, but cannot ping the phone switches from any pc attached to the 2610 (even though I have set a correct IP address on the PC for the phone subnet)

3. There must be some way to have all these switches automatically talk to each other without me having to type in the VLAN info and routing info for each switch.

4. How does this Voice VLAN differ from how I have it setup now?

5. I also need to move all the data network to VLAN 100, do I just need to make the primary vlan 100 instead of 1?

Here is a brief config for each switch.

SW1 - for ALL PORTS  - (untagged 1,100,102) Hybrid link-type, PVID 1 (vlan int1 = 192.168.1.250/24 vlan 100 = 10.10.0.250/24 vlan int102 = 10.10.2.250/24)

SW2 - (PORTS 1-48 untagged vlan 1) (PORTS 47-48 TAGGED VLAN 102) (PORTS 1-46 VLAN 102 AUTO) VLAN INT1=192.168.1.251/24, VLAN INT 100=10.10.0.251/24, VLAN INT 102=10.10.2.251/4)

SW3 - (PORTS 1-22 UNTAGGED VLAN 102 - LINK TYPE ACCESS- PVID 102) (PORTS 23-24 TAGGGED 1,100,102- LINK TYPE HYBRID- PVID 1)

SW4 (same as SW3)

The conections are as follows:

GE0/1 of SW1 connects to GE0/47 of SW2

E0/48 of SW2 connects to the GE0/23 of SW3

GE0/24 of SW3 connects to GE0/23 of SW4

GE0/24 of SW4 connects to the E0/1 of the Adtran router

[Vince_Whirlwind]

A. You seem to be saying that VLAN100 isn't trunked from SW2 to either of its neighbours?

B. You have both SW1 & SW2 routing? WHy?

C. Personally, I pick a switch and call that my "core". It is the layer-3 switch for the network. Then I build my network in a star shape around it, including WAN service, with all other switches being Layer-2 switches.

What you have is a whole lot of daisy-chaining. Sometimes the physical reality makes that unavoidable, though. If you can get all your switches (as much as possible) to link to SW1 directly instead of each other, that would be good.

D. I always try to make my configs as uniform as possible on every switch on my network: you have the following which should be changed so they are all the same instead of different:

 a. trunk ports on SW3 & SW4 have VLAN1,100,102 all TAGGED.

 b. trunk ports on SW2 have VLAN1 UNTAGGED, VLAN 102 TAGGED

 c. trunk port on SW1 has VLAN1,100,102 HYBRID (?why?)

In answer to your questions:

1. VOICE VLAN - on Cisco switches, "VOICE VLAN" tells a port to use CDP to tell the phone the correct VLAN to use for Voice. On non-Cisco switches, I've either used LLDP to do this, or just configured each access port as an 802.1q trunk (VLAN1 UNTAGGED, VLAN102 TAGGED). I've never figured out exactly what "VOICE VLAN" actually *does* on HP switches.

2. You don't report what IP address is on the phone switches, so I'm not sure what you're pinging.

A PC with a 10.10.2.0 address on it, patched to any of your switches in a port configured as VLAN102 UNTAGGED should be able to ping any other device that's in VLAN102, assuming that device responds to ping and doesn't have a firewall to filter out ICMP.

3. Your switches do not need to talk to each other. Each switch has an IP address solely for the purpose of you accessing it via the network for management purposes. (Ideally all those addresses are in a dedicated VLAN you call "Management"). Additionally, one device on the network is configured with all of your subnets' "default gateway" addresses and that device performs inter-VLAN routing. That could hbe your Adtran router, or it could be a switch where you enable "IP routing".

You need to configure VLANs on each of your switches, as per your design, and configure the trunk ports with the correct VLANs for your inter-switch links.

4. Your VLAN 102 is your Voice VLAN, I take it? The "Voice VLAN" command might do something with QoS or something. I wouldn't worry about it too much. I've read the manual and it doesn't seem to say anything about what it actually does.

5. Re-address each VLAN1 device to a 10.10.0.0 address and reconfigure its switchport to VLAN 100. "Primary VLAN" has nothing to do with this. Get rid of the "hybrid" VLAN config which is confusing you. Each switch should have 3 VLANs 1,100,102, and all of those VLANs should be trunked to any neighbouring switch. Phone ports need your DATA VLAN untagged and VOICE VLAN tagged.

[mstrmp3]

Thanks for the reply.

In answer to some of your questions.:

All of these switches are in the same rack.

a:  if I have a PC with 10.10.2.3 connected to SW2, I cannot ping any 10.10.2.x on SW3 or SW4.

The same goes for if I have a pc with 10.10.2.4 connected to SW1, I cannot ping any other 10.10.2.x on any other switch SW2-SW4. So there is a config problem that I'm missing somewhere. 

b: becasue I'm an idiot and dont know what I'm doing. ;)

C:  So, if you had your choice, would you make the a5210 the "core" switch and the others star off of it?

I guess I dont really have to get everyone on VLAN 100, but I need the outer offices to be able to use our firewall for internet. I'm not sure how to set those vlan D/Gs correctly on each switch.

I do not see anywhere to create/designate a trunk port on the 2610. am I missing something?

again, thanks in advance.

[Vince_Whirlwind]

"Trunk" actually means "link aggregation". In Cisco world, we call a link with multiple VLANs a "trunk", too.

What you are looking for is "adding tagged VLANs to a switchport".

And yes, make one of them your "core", make sure it has the "default gateway" for each of the subnets, re-patch all the switches in a star shape and make sure all the VLANs are on all the inter-switch links. (And of course, remove routing from the other switch that has it enabled).

You configure a router address for each subnet on the "core", in this case by putting that address on the VLAN interface.