design and configuration tips & suggestions

[danletkeman]

This is the current configuration of switches I have setup on our network. Its about 150 miles long(east-west) and about 20 miles wide(north-south). All of the locations are connected via a wireless bridges(trango, tranzeo, smartbridges) or via an ISP private vlan. Currently I have the 3550's connecting to each other via ospf and they are all doing inter vlan routing. The 3550 at location 20(3550-20) is I guess one of the main switches. Its located at the data center and it has the most connections to other wirelessly connected buildings. I have it configured to do pbr to 4 different DSL connections and it also has the switches from the data center connected to it. The small to medium sized locations have 2950's or 2960's.

To give you an idea of what is all going on now:

18 Wireless Bridges

1200 Workstations

30 Servers

3000 Users

21 Mbit of internet access

200 Gig's of Data being Backed up over night

1 Local server at each location

We are planning on implementing a video conferencing system soon as well as voice services in the future.

What I would like to know is what is the best configuration for these switches to prepare them for video conferencing, data connections and maybe voice?

Vlan Configurations?

Trunking?

Routing?

QOS?

Any ideas or suggestions on configurations would be great. I want to make sure I go about this the right way the first time so I'm not reconfiguring when we want to setup the video or voice services.

Thanks,

Dan.

[mheusinger]

Hi,

when designing and implementing a video and voip network there are many things to consider. So I will not try to list some of them but would recommend you to read through

1) "IP Videoconferencing Solution Reference Network Design (SRND)"

http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns280/c649/ccmigration_09186a00800d67f6.pdf

2) "Enterprise QoS Solution Reference Network Design Guide Version 3.3"

http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns432/c649/ccmigration_09186a008049b062.pdf

3) "Campus Network Multilayer Architecture and Design Guidelines"

http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns656/c649/cdccont_0900aecd804ab67d.pdf

QoS will be needed in any case and there are separate chapters regarding your different Catalyst switches.

Generally VoIP will be transported in separate Voice VLANs interconnected through IP routing. So you should also have a look into your overall LAN design. 3) gives you a guidance to a robust modern switching design.

Hope this helps!

Regards, Martin