Connecting stand alone lab environment to the rest of the network?

[apbaseball]

Looking for a little guidance. I built a stand alone lab environment consisting of 3 ESXi hosts, 1 Equallogic iSCSI storage array, and 2 Cisco 3560G switches.

I have the default gateways for my 4 VLANs pointing to the 3560s. They are set in Layer 3 mode and doing the routing for this lab environment.

I now want to connect this lab environment to the rest of our companies network. I have configured trunk ports on my 3560s to trunk the 4 VLANs and did the same on the two Cisco switches that run the rest of the office.

At this point I am unable to access anything that sits in the lab environment when I am connected to the other Cisco switches that run the rest of the office. I assume this is some sort of routing issue but I'm not sure the best way to proceed. Any insight would be helpful! If I need to clarify anything please let me know!

[Jon Marshall]

If the lab switches are routing the clans then connect to other switches using L3 links and route between the switches. 

[Jon Marshall]

i give up 

[apbaseball]

Do I have to do any special configuration on those ports? Ie. the two trunk ports I have going from the lab switches to the other switches in the office? 

[Jon Marshall]

Dont connect with trunks connect with L3 routed ports and then use static routes on each set of switches. 

Using L3 links means no STP between your lab and production switches. 

Does that make sense ?

[apbaseball]

Yes, it does make sense. What do I set the static route to though? That's the part I'm confused about.

[Jon Marshall]

If you use L3 routed ports then you assign the IPs to the interfaces. 

So you then use that as the next hop IP for any static routes and this way you can route between the lab and production switches. 

Jon