Better to use Procurve 5400 or Cisco 2800 as def gateway?

[Rod Hendricks]

I am about to deploy a converged branch network.

It has a Procurve 5400 as the branch site switch, with 2626-PWRs at the edge. It also has a Cisco 2811 as the branch router.

There will be aroudn 6 vLANs, including a voice vlan.

My question is would it be better for me to set the switch as the default gateway for the end devices or the cisco router?

My thoughts so far:
Router as DG:
one less L3 hop if traffic has to traverse the WAN.

Switch as DG:
Reduce the load off the cisco router by routing local vLANs at the switch, and only forwarding WAN-destined traffic to the router.

Any other thoughts?

[Mohieddin Kharnoub]

Hi

If you setup the 5400 as the Main Vlans routing switch that will be better.
Just think about it, your Vlans traffic will never cross to the WAN router, and you will be having also better switching capacity and better management for your network also.

And keep the cisco router for WAN routing, Internet, VPN, and so on.

In such deployment, the router will be busy with WAN routing and VPN as well as protecting the network by its itegrated Firewall, so itsd not a good idea to have it also for LAN inter-vlan routing.

Good Luck !!!

[Joel Belizario]

I agree with the previous post - the 5400 series have a lot of capability built into them, after all HP market it as a L3 switch.

Would be a shame to have paid the money for a 5400 not to use its features?

[Rod Hendricks]

I tend to agree with you both. So i'll lock that into the design then.

now to extend this a little further, would there be any benefit in having the 2800 router straddling all vlans (using a .1Q trunk), or would it be better to create a separate broadcast domain for sending traffic between the 5400 switch and the 2800 router.

Initially, I can see that if the router were to straddle the vlans, ICMP redirects could reduce load and latency by advising end nodes that they have a direct route to the wan router, as opposed to needing to hop thru the L3 switch. In this configuration, I could also use the wan router as the vlan router (with minimal reconfiguration) if the L3 switch ever had a problem.

On the flip side, straddling all the vlans could introduce an unnecessary load on the router ethernet interfaces.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Matt Hobbs]

I think ICMP redirects are to be generally avoided as a best practice if possible as they lead to less than optimal routing.

If the 5400 was to fail, then I'm guessing that the link to the other router would go down anyway.

Best to create that separate VLAN between the 2 routers in my opinion.

[Joel Belizario]

I agree with Matt, I highly doubt the switch would fail only at L3 you probably would lose connectivity to the router and hosts as well.