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CONVERTING flat NWK to VLANs - INPUT REQUIRED

CanEHdian
Level 1
Level 1

‎10-15-2004 06:41 AM - edited ‎03-02-2019 07:18 PM

Hey everyone,

I've been asked to look into this for our corporate LAN, but I'm foreseeing many obstacles and would like input from those of you who have experience with this. We are not a big shop (~150 users) and I'm not sure if re-organizing our flat network to VLANs is worth the obstacles and the complexity involved - but maybe it's not as big a deal as I believe?

Regardless, here are my concerns:

- DHCP (presently only one server, will need L3 switch, multiple scopes-gateways-settings, ???)

- Microsoft/Windows services (nwk neighborhood?, mapped drives?, etc...)

- Routing (no dynamic routing presently, ideas?)

- Switching complexity: one L3 (3550), several 2950s, add VTP?, etc...

I'm sure there's more... help! I could really use some input to prepare my proposal.

Thanks,

Al

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smif101
Level 4
Level 4

‎10-15-2004 07:15 AM

The biggest reason you will want to seperate your LAN traffic is if you are getting high utilization on your network. If everything is running full-duplex in your switches than I would think everything is fine with 150 users. Don't fix what isn't broke! Now if you are seeing a around 40-60% utilization on your network consistenly than I would think about it.

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ceri.jones
Level 1
Level 1

‎10-15-2004 07:37 AM

Personally I would agree with the comments of the last responder. If your network performance is OK you don't need to segment - and if your environment is switched throughout and you have low utilisation you really shouldn't need to.

Obviously if you segment you will need to route, but you probably don't need a dynamic routing protocol - statics should more than suffice.

DHCP will be fine, and you don't need to add any more servers - unless you need additional contingency - as long as you're forwarding bootp everything will be OK. Yes, you will have to add additional scopes, but this is not a hardship.

I'm not too clued up on MS environments - my experience is all NT 4.0, and that was WINS based. As long as you had a WINS servers the Microsoft network would be OK. W2K and W2K3 are more DNS based and will probably work even better.

As for complexity - KISS. Keep it simple. What is your reason for VLANing. Do you want to separate departments? Then implement a VLAN per department. Do you want to separate your clients from your servers? Well that's only two VLANs. By floor? Building? Oh, and turn off VTP unless you have a specific need for it...

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