Moving in-house datacenter off site

[trevino200]

Moving in-house datacenter off site

currently we have in house our own datacenter which we have 2 x 5412's acting as our core switches running vrrp between them with 2 spanning tree instances for our LAN side. Our floor switches (5412's)  have 2 uplilnks that go to each core switch. The core switches connect to our core routers that connect into our MPLS connecting our 4 other sites. We are the headquarters so everything comes back here to the hub for internet, files, etc... 

We are investigating on moving our datacenter out a few blocks to a "real" datacenter for redundancy in power and connectivity so one of the ideas is to move all our datacenter equipment and tie back to the headquarters with a gig fiber connection.  this move will ilnclude my core switches, so after we move the core switches which currently connects my uplinks to my floors my plan is  I  will have to put in two more switches to take their place for the floor connectivity.  I will setup vrrp with these as well as the multiple instances of spanning tree.

Should I remove the multiple spanning trees from the datacenter core switches since they will no longer have my floor uplinks will it hurt to keep them?  should i remove my floor vlans from my datacenter core switches? I am wanting to keep all my floor vlans on these datacenter core switches since we sometimes create  virtual machines that have that vlan associated with them so keeping them would be ideal.

On the connectivity from my office over the 1 gig fiber to my core switches at the new datacenter i am thinking using the default vlan as my untagged port over to my datacenter core switches and tagging all the vlans down? I am putting together a small diagram that shows what we currently have and what we are envisioning towards. thank you in advance for any assistance or tips.

Carolton

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Removing the multiple spanning trees from the datacenter core switches probably isn't necessary, but it's always good to simplify your design as much as possible, so if you don't need them, get rid of them.

You should definitely remove your floor vlans from your datacenter core switches if your new HQ Distribution layer VRRP is doing the routing for those subnets.

Are you *sure* 1Gb is enough? It doesn't sound like much in this day and age where all it takes is 3 simultaneous ftp transfers from desktop clients to easily saturate a 1Gb link.

I'm not an anti-default-VLAN nazi myself, but I generally don't use it if I have a choice. You don't need any untagged VLAN on Procurve switches, so don't use one, and don't use VLAN1 at all - you should have a "Management VLAN" that has all your devices' management IP addresses int. Or even multiple management VLANs, one for network infrastructure, one for server infrastructure, etc...

You talk about tagging your VLANs to the new Data Centre switches, but I'm not sure you should be spanning any VLANs across the link. If both layers (HQ Distribution and DC Core) are doing routing, then there shouldn't be any need for VLANs on the Distribution-Core link.