Trunking Metro E?

[ChrisPAE]

My company has some gear that's on prem at our main office, and some at a colo datacenter across town.  Currently they're connected via point to point VPN handled by the firewalls, however we're recently purchased a metro-e connection from our ISP (they also own the datacenter) and have a nice drop right into our rack.

2 questions:

1) do I have to encrypt the traffic between the two and run the metro-e over our firewalls

2) If I don't have to encrypt, can I trunk some switch ports to pass traffic?  At the main office the "core" switch is a 5412 and at the datacenter it's a 2920

[parnassus]

Is it really a straight point-to-point copper [*] (Fast|Gigabit)-Ethernet link between your two sites (no switches|taps in between so far)?

If (a big IF) it is really so you can think of it like a pure Layer 2 extension between your two sites and traffic encryption/firewalling/natting (or whatever you can think of about Layer 3) could/would be avoided...since the link can be defined as a Layer 2 uplink between Switches (eventually permits VLANs, if any).

Sound reasonable?

[*] sure some Fiber Optics/Copper Ethernet mediaconverters are there...to overcome copper Ethernet lenght limit.

[ChrisPAE]

Thanks, that makes sense. 

After confirming with the provider that the connection is already encrypted on their equipment, I'm going to create a /30 on each switch and just add a route for each vlan on each switch.