WAN Connected a New Site LGFL2

[EN4CER]

Hi All,

 

This is a preliminary enquiry.

 

The school is looking to acquire another site circa 2 miles away and would like for users at that site to be able to use their current domain login accounts to access their respective domains, namely Admin or Curriculum on the servers located at the main/current school location.

 

Please can you advise on the most straight forward way for this to be achieved, taking into account we current LGFL2 and have a 10MB line.

 

PS. I am trying to avoid purchasing more servers.

 

Any help greatly appreciated

[FishCustard]

Ultimately a fiber downlink/high-bandwidth wireless link (like AirFiber) to the new site is all you'd need. Computers can authenticate against the DC at your site over the fiber line. If all the services they'll be accessing will be at your site, you may not need another DC at the branch location (if the fiber goes down, yeah with a replica DC the clients will be able to log on, but what else could they do if all the files are at the other site?). However, to reduce latency, I'd get a (read-only?) DC put in at the site if you have a suitable server lying around or can source one cheap.

 

Also, I know this is going beyond the scope of the question, but I thought I'd ask anyway - is there a need to have two separate domains? Having one simplifies lots of things, and adding this site to your network may be the perfect incentive to get rid of the split-domain system if you want to!

Edited May 28, 2013 by FishCustard

[EN4CER]

Ultimately a fiber downlink/high-bandwidth wireless link (like AirFiber) to the new site is all you'd need. Computers can authenticate against the DC at your site over the fiber line. If all the services they'll be accessing will be at your site, you may not need another DC at the branch location (if the fiber goes down, yeah with a replica DC the clients will be able to log on, but what else could they do if all the files are at the other site?). However, to reduce latency, I'd get a (read-only?) DC put in at the site if you have a suitable server lying around or can source one cheap.

 

Also, I know this is going beyond the scope of the question, but I thought I'd ask anyway - is there a need to have two separate domains? Having one simplifies lots of things, and adding this site to your network may be the perfect incentive to get rid of the split-domain system if you want to!

 

Thanks for your reply. The existing two domains is a VLAN for the curriculum and the admin networks..

 

Will it just be a matter of putting in another LGFL firewall at the new site and that will link directly to the other. It has been mentioned about getting setting different subnets at the new site, but I'm not sure what the value is in doing this?

[FishCustard]

You wouldn't need another LGfL firewall at all. Consider the case that you were adding a new building to your existing site. You would simply create a link between a switch in the new building and your core switch, plug in client PCs to this new switch, and off you go. All you're doing here is making the link longer.

 

Packets will travel from the client PCs at the new site, to the new site's edge switch, over the fiber link (or wireless link) to the main site, to the core switch and then to wherever they're going. If it's out to the Internet, they'll go through the main site's router.

 

As for the VLANs, you'll just need to make sure that the link between the two sites is set up to use VLAN trunking protocol (this is configured on the switches at either end of the link), so that both the admin and curriculum VLANs can be seen at the new site.

 

Hope this makes sense...

[EN4CER]

Cheers for that Richard. I'll read up..

 

Any more help, greatly appreciated

[FishCustard]

No probs, feel free to ask!