I've got a situation where several remote sites are connected to a central location using AT&T's Customized Switched Metro Ethernet (CSME). The core switches at each location are Cisco 4500 series units.
The problem is this... each remote site has a server assigned to it, which is being implemented as a virtual machine at the central location in the vlan belonging to the remote site's core network. The AT&T network learns the MAC addresses from each remote site, and the switch at the central location learns them from AT&T. This is working fine, but AT&T has to learn every MAC addresses from all the remote sites. This means we need to make sure they're allowing sufficient addresses to cover all the sites, plus they charge according to how many they're allowing through.
I'm trying to research alternatives. Is there any way to pass the MAC addresses from the remote site to the switches connecting the VMWare servers (6 servers between 2 physical switches) without special setup on AT&T's part? If it will require additional hardware, that's fine, just need to look at all the options.
