Cisco Catalyst 3560 E

[imanco671]

Hello Community,

I am about to purchase a Cisco Catalyst switch. I am not 100% sure if it can do routing between my 4 different subnets.

I looked throught the product guides on cisco.com, I just want to make sure that someone out there has used these switches as an internal router.

I know I should stick with the enchanced IOS version instead of the standard.

Thanks everyone!

[cadet alain · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

Yes you can do it:

-enable ip routing: ip routing global config command

- configure VLANS: either with VTP or manually with the vlan x command

- configure a SVI for each VLAN: interface vlan x

                                                 ip address x.x.x.x y.y.y.y

-configure trunk link to L2 switches with clients connected or configure access ports for each VLAN on the 3560

-optional: create a default-route on the 3560 with the ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 x.x.x.x command

Regards.

Alain.

[imanco671]

Hi Alain,

Thanks for the quick response and solution using VLANs.

But is this the best solution for me? using a catalyst to act as an internal router.

Should I re-think this? or is using a layer-3 switch common as an internal router?

John

[cadet alain]

Hi,

it's a common way of doing because using a router would be less efficient especially with a high amount of VLANs.

Regards.

Alain.

[imanco671]

Hi Alain,

Okay I will stick with the catalyst then. I will have to setup VLANS for all my different subnets.

I have attached a network map for you. I am wondering if you can take a look and see if things are correct on the placement of my new catalyst switch. Should I design differently? What would you recommend?

Thanks

John

[ameya_oke]

Hi John,

Cisco has got a presentation file of this product on its website.

Please go through it for more clarification on whether or not it suits your business needs.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps7077/catalyst_3750e_3560e_bdm.pdf

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps7078/product_at_a_glance0900aecd805bacaf.pdf

Also, L3 switch is used quiet frequenltly as an internal router than one would imagine.

As a matter of fact on my customer network routing was recently done on  L3 switches.

Now we have revamped our internal infra but my experiance was good with our last setup.

Ameya

[ameya_oke]

Hi John,

If i am to speak about the position of the L3 switch, it seems right.

On other unrelated topic, i dont see any sort of redundancy in your setup apart from a cloud of firewalls.

I hope this is not the exact topology and there is L2 redundancy in place.

Also considering amount of firewalls used, i suppose the data that you are handeling are critical and i would urge

Please confirm.

Ameya

[tommyboay]

Hi John,

In addition to all comments, I am myself working on a pretty big network and confirm your solution to be just fine. I usually add routers where specific services are needed only. In your situation, there would be no benefit unless exceeding the device's routing capacity.

Tom

[imanco671]

Thanks all for the comments on my network map. I do need better redundancy. I am starting my redundancy by getting 2 catalyst switches which will be my internal router. I am not sure if I can have automatic failover on these switches, but I can at least copy the image to the backup switch and just manually failover if needed.

As for the other firewalls, I have an offline duplicate backup firewall for each. It is more of a manual thing in my network. I am trying to get to an automatic failover network though.

Thanks for the input, I will be using Alain's VLAN setup (in earlier reply) for each of my subnets. It should be interesting, since I do not have too much experience with setting up multiple VLANs for network routing. I have only used it for phone traffic.

[ameya_oke]

Hi John,

You can have auto failover with help of HSRP protocol running for each VLAN that you would configure.

You would as it is be creating SVI interfaces on both L3 switches.

alsong with it you can configure HSRP.

Ameya

[imanco671]

Thanks Ameya