Procurves and split site buildings

[synaesthesia]

If anyone has any Procurve kit and have a split/twin site school, or vlans/subnets that reflect such a setup, would you be so kind as to let me have an ogle at your configs? Just a learning experience, we've gotten so close to getting ours working then have been effectively knocked back by our ISP.

[glennda]

Would you not have them setup separately and then have a VPN from default gateway to default gateway on the other site?

[synaesthesia]

These are linked via fibre, no need for VPN. We have a rough and working idea of links thanks to a lot of help from HP and a few others however it's finer points which are getting in the way, such as inter-vlan routing whilst keeping services like lanview, pxe etc working.

[glennda]

These are linked via fibre, no need for VPN. We have a rough and working idea of links thanks to a lot of help from HP and a few others however it's finer points which are getting in the way, such as inter-vlan routing whilst keeping services like lanview, pxe etc working.

 

Ah ok fair enough - this is what we have setup on the core (HP 5406ZL) for single site routing

 

vlan 4

name "A Block"

tagged Trk11

ip helper-address 192.168.112.48 <<

ip forward-protocol udp 192.168.112.48 tftp <<<< PXE BOOT HELPER

ip address 10.4.0.1 255.255.0.0 <<<< Subnet and IP of vlan

ip bootp-gateway 10.4.0.1

 

I assume you would set up a route on the two cores to forward anything for the subnet of the other site to it?

[SYNACK]

Have you got a seporate global managment VLAN setup for all the switches etc, this could help with the managment/monitering stuff.

[synaesthesia]

Cheers. It's getting increasingly complicated, I'll post a copy here later. Separate management vlan, separate vlan for the link, vlan for the servers, vlan for the devices (printers, clients, switches) at each site.

[IrritableTech]

I'd leave all your switches in one vlan. I doubt you'll see much of an advantage keeping printers in two seporate vlans either.

 

I'd go for

Switch VLAN

Servers VLAN

Printer VLAN

Building A Client VLAN

Building B Client VLAN

 

Because you are using HP, you'll need to tag VLANs on links, and untag end devices.

Decide on your core switch, and configure it with IP addresses and ip-helpers.

 

It is a hard subject to get your head around at first, but it soon becomes fairly easy once you've got the terminology.

[synaesthesia]

It's reasonably easy for me now having spent the last 4 or 5 weeks learning the CLI inside out, the difficulty is getting the most efficiency from it whilst keeping as little traffic as possible from traversing the site link.

 

For now we're going completely flat with everything trunked into the core(s) but for the summer we need to crack down on the broadcast traffic. The printers are the #1 culprits of network chatter so that's our first port of call (We just need to keep them management via Papercut from one server on one site)

[Eric]

For now we're going completely flat with everything trunked into the core(s) but for the summer we need to crack down on the broadcast traffic. The printers are the #1 culprits of network chatter so that's our first port of call

Are you sure that these will be a problem? You might see "a lot" of broadcasts using a network monitor, but it's unlikely that these would add up to a level which would have much impact on your inter-site link, either in bps or in packets-per-second terms.

 

Unless your link is low bandwidth, of course ...

[CyberNerd]

a separate vlan with a 30bit mask for the link should be enough to stop too much unwanted traffic across the link.

 

 

edit: I added a diagram of how we did it - it's on the same site, but the principal applies.

 

 

Edited January 12, 2012 by CyberNerd