Hi All,
Looking for advice on a design. I'm upgrading my agin 4507R backbone to somthing more scalable.
I have been investigating 3 different designs, just looking for some feed back:
Requirments I have to work with:
· Total of 155 connected ports
o 55 of those are going to ESX hosts (15).
o 30-ish are devices that are simply for appliance management; SAN Switches, KVMs etc etc. These ports don’t even need Gig connectivity.
· I’ve been asked to bring in 10g to the environment
o Really, only our 15 ESX hosts right now would benefit from this.
o SAN is running FC, this was just replaced and new FC switches purchased.
· I have been tasked with implementing DMVPN this year.
· Need L3 capabilities. OSPF and BGP
· Need to maintain current 100/1g density for the time-being until we can migrate to 10g. currently at 96 10/100/1000 ports per 4500.
It’s a collapsed core design. WAN connects directly to 4500s and then access-layer switches from my various floors at HQ location connect directly to core along with servers. We don’t have any server aggregation switches currently. We’re about 90% virtual, so most things are consolidated onto 15 ESX hosts. WAN is MPLS with BGP Peering to provider via the 4500s.
- Option 1:
- Cat 6500Es with VSS and SUP-720
- Good speed, and scalable. SUP-720 has been around a while. I need the new solution to last 7+ years.
- Any news on when SUP-1.4T will be out?
- A vendor recommended I look at Nexus line as Cisco has them priced pretty competitively.
- Maybe do DMVPN on these.
- Most Expensive
- Option 2:
- Pair of N7k
- Overkill IMO. WAAY more switch than I need.
- Pair of 3900s for DMVPN
- Not as Expensive as option 1, but still up there.
- Option 3:
- Pair of N5k 5548; Pair of N2k 2248TP; and Pair of 3945E
- More backplan capactiy than 6500s.
- Gives the throughput I need for raw switching as well as scalability / upgradability if i want to add / tweak small things going forward.
- Cons: 3945Es Might be a bottleneck. I was thinking of doing 2x GigE connections in etherchannel to each N5k for redundancy and additional bandwidth.
- 3945E Seems to be pretty high capacity. These guys would be used for DMVPN and WAN routing as well (BGP Peering with Provider). Only have 18 sites that are pretty stable so overhead would be minimal.
- Each 3945E would have 2x Gig e to each N5k, 1 GigE to MPLS cloud, 1 GigE connected to other 3945E.
- Lowest cost
I'm liking option 3 right now because it's more of a "Tierd" approach soft of, but i was wondering what others think. I'm not required to go with lowest cost, I've been able to go with what is RIGHT for us not necessarilly the cheapest. Any input would be appreciated.
