Managed Office Setup

_-J-_ · 29 Jul 2009 at 10:48

Posted this on Experts Exchange and didn't really get anywhere, hopefully the knowledgeble people of OcUK can help

We have a customer who at the moment has a single ADSL line (speed 7mbs) split between clients in a office. They currently have 17 offices with people in them sharing this connection and at the moment have a basic QOS setup on a billion 7300 router. They also have a basic VLAN switch with VLAN's configured for each office.

They want to be able to provide 1Mbs connections to each of the offices and then let this be split between the computers in the office. We were thinking of Bonding 3 ADSL lines, but not sure how to VLAN off with another router in place (something like a DrayTek 2820), how to ensure each office gets 1Mbs and only uses thier bandwidth and also allow each office to have a public IP.

One solution i did think of, but its not very clean is the following

3 x BT Lines >>>> Draytek 2820 or Similar >>>>> Basic Cable Router (for each office) >>> VLAN Switch >>>> Clients

This would mean the basic router would be given a public IP and then the clients would be using that to connect to the internet.

bigredshark · 30 Jul 2009 at 14:09

Well I'd use a single Cisco router to do all the routing and QOS, then a switch to distribute the VLANs. Nice and simple with the minimum equipment. Personally I don't think xDSL bonding is a great way to go unless you have no alternative, a proper 10Mbit circuit is going to be a much more intelligent choice but thats a question of price.

It's nothing advanced to do on a single Cisco router though, a box like a 2801 should have plenty capacity and will take enough WICs for line bonding if you want to do that...

wij · 30 Jul 2009 at 15:11

Depends on budget, you could use something like Catalyst 2960's and use the CIR and QOS features on the switch ports to rate limit them to 1Mbps each way.

_-J-_ · 4 Aug 2009 at 16:18

Is Cisco the only route to go down really?

Caged · 4 Aug 2009 at 23:28

For routers you could also look at Juniper and HP for switching. Depends what sorts of prices you get quoted - ignore the list price on these things.

Skidilliplop · 5 Aug 2009 at 09:08

You could use Extreme networks Swtich/Switches to do all of it on one box. Something like an X250e with basic edge licensing. However you're limited to Ethernet ports for your WAN connections and will need modem/soho type router to connect the ADSL.
You can then set up QoS/traffic shaping based on VLAN or one of the many filtering criteria in an ACL.
If they don't need cross VLAN communication at wirespeed then you could just slap an egress rate limit on the VLANs.

An x250 costs more on it's own than a Cisco 2800 but when you take into account switching it might work out cheaper overall.