New Core + Access

[Jcx500]

So...

 

looking at infrastructure for a potential new site

 

Does anyone use the newer Aruba 2930M as a core. How does it perform?

 

Also Looking at 2540 as a access switch. How do they perform?

 

Also do people still have Domain controllers on multiple sites these days ? I was thinking of deploying a few vms over there on a small hyper v host. Or the other option is to go serverless on the new site

 

Thanks

[ordeology]

I went serverless for two sites, all they had a server for was DC, and file storage... so when it came to server refresh we ripped them out. File storage had already mostly moved to OneDrive and authentication was provided by the two main sites where the main server infrastructure sat. It did mean they were reliant on the WAN connections but we had failover connections in place and, the main connections the only time we had outages was planned maintenance which was once in a blue moon out of hours.

 

As for the Aruba switches I can't help we were a Cisco house.

[3s-gtech]

We have 6300Ms as core and edge, I know some sites had 2930s but can’t give a huge amount of help other than I’ve been impressed with the kit, the ease of configuration, the web interface and the speed.

[Norphy]

It’s hard to gauge the suitability of the 2930M as a core switch without knowing more about your organisation.

 

If you have a single site, you’re planning to terminate your VLANs at the core, if you’re not planning to do any internal network routing outside of that device, your use of 10gbit interfaces is going to be limited and if you don’t need more than four fibre ports then yes, I think it will be fine.

 

If your school is part of an interconnected MAT or if you’re planning to push L3 to the edge or if any of the either criteria above aren’t met, I would suggest looking at a higher end switch, either a 3800 or a 5400R. Or one of the newer CX switches, but I don’t know enough about that range to make recommendations about those.

 

The advantage of using something like a 5400R is that it’s easily expandable, should your requirements change later on. Need fibre ports? Buy a module. Need 10gig or NBaseT ports? Buy a module. A very flexible arrangement.

 

My MAT has a few 2540 switches sitting on the edge in our older sites and they’re perfectly good L2 switches. They use the standard ProcurveOS (Now ArubaOS, badge engineering at its finest) and have a nice web interface if you don’t like the CLI. The only niggle I have with them is that they’re arbitrarily fussy about the kind of transceivers they accept; we bought some 10gbit LRM transceivers because our older sites still have old fibre and the 2540 doesn’t support those.

[PlantHead]

We have 2540's as our edge switches and they have been very good. No complaints at all.

Our Core is a pair of stacked 3810's which had some issues with needing to update firmware at the start but otherwise have been very stable. When paired with the 2540's it makes a lot of jobs easier, really I can't complain

 

Edit: the transceiver comment above is a good point. We now buy the same model everytime and it has been fine but we had issues with some older transceiver's we had in stock

Edited January 8, 2021 by PlantHead

[Davit2005]

We put in about 90 2540s PoE+ switches about 3 years ago and have been rock solid with no failures.

 

As we had specific needs for these specific locations such as for wired NAC controlled access these were great investment and tie in with our NAC that we use for WiFi as well giving a complete BOYD solution whether on Wired or WiFi.

 

Rolling out was easy as configured a PowerShell script to dump config in a txt file and then just pasted in to the cli console. we could of done some sort of auto provisioning but had limited time to get one sorted out.

Edited January 8, 2021 by Davit2005