Topology help

[Bakedgoods]

Just a quick question about server placement in my topology below.Does that look ok?

I'm not sure if it would be best to have each server with two fibre cards connecting to two different switches for redundancy, or to just have each server with cards connecting to one high availability switch (with redudnant controllers).

 

[garyh]

Yep, it looks perfectly fine. Just make sure you configure the spanning-tree properly.

 

[Bakedgoods]

Cheers.

Any thoughts on the question I asked about the switch(s) providing access to the servers?

 

[garyh]

That question can only be answered by yourself - it depends on your growth plans and how you wish for the network resiliency to be.

Consider for example - Whats to stop you plugging those fibre cards directly into the core routers? You want a formal topology for a reason, to cope with future growth. Plugging fibres from clients directly into the distribution switches rather than the access layer switches means utilising ports that can otherwise be used for future growth of the distribution layer later.

You may also consider that the distributional layer will have more 'homed' switching configuration to speed up access - if you are requiring additional switching or routing to be performed on those devices then that will also mean utilising more resources on that particular switch - something that you want to ideally avoid.

 

[Bakedgoods]

Cheers.

I'm unsure about addressing the switches. I've got various vlans and subnetworks assigned to these, but from which subnetwork and VLAN do I assign the switch IP addresses?

Do I give the switches an address from the management VLAN range?

 

[garyh]

The management of each switch is done through the native VLAN (in the case of Cisco the default for this is VLAN1 - note, for security it's usually best practice to change this and have ports with no VLAN attached assigned to a deadpool VLAN so they do not have access to the native VLAN)

So you would need an addressing scheme for the native VLAN - then just address it like any other VLAN - you would then set the default gateway to your management network.