Can we assign two servers with different location to the same segment?

[Hanry Zhou]

We have two servers that are located in two different states, because they are somewhat related to each other, can we assign these two servers located in the same segment? for instance, via v-lan? Is this normal things to do, or nobody would really do that?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Hanry,

I suppose you can try that, but there might be a latency issue. In general, VLAN's are used to limit the scope of network collision domains.

This means that the number of servers that are polling each other is limited.

This boosts network performance and decreases collision of network packets.

What you propose, if it even works, will violate these principles and might make your network environment/response unstable.

Just because they have similar purposes doesn not mean they need to be in the same collision domain.

I would not do that without consulting a real network expert, which would not be me.

SEP

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas.]

Well looking at it from the network poing of view, it's still possible, but not really suggested.
Since most of the heavy traffic is kept on the local network for a reason. Latency, collisions, TCO of WAN's, redundancy for those dedicated lines. The bandwidth needed to simulated the local network over a WAN.
it's always possible, depending on the type of traffic that you are going to move.
A bit expensive, from the routing point of view, since you want good equipment to protect your data.

We have done that in the past with SAP servers, so it should work.

Regards,

jaime.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You seem to be confusing similarity of function with a network subnet. The two really have nothing to do with each other. I would let the network guys do whatever seems most efficient from their point of view --- and that will almost certainly be separate subnets for each geographic area with routers. Generally, not only do servers have to deal with WAN traffic but also with LAN traffic as well (e.g for backup, hostname resolution, NTP, NFS, ...).

If you also want similar IP addresses then that too is "doable" even when the actual subnets are very different via NAT (Network Address Translation).