four tier 6509 deployment

[j.newkirk]

I am in the process of migrating a redundant pair of 6509s to a four tier environment. my preliminary plans are to collapse the core and access enviroments into one tier and the distribution environment in the other. is that the best practice for the infrastructure. My plans are to host only fiber uplinks from my workgroup and aggregation farm to the distribution switches. Also, where should i run hsrp. I am having stp convergence issues with the two tier environment that i currently have (network connections lost during convergence). so i want to eliminate that issue whereas the server farm is not affected during stp convergence. I am also migrating out of catos during this upgrade.

[Edison Ortiz]

Your request can not be fulfilled in a simple post. I recommend you to start reading the Cisco SRND for guidance and understanding on how new networks are designed

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns656/networking_solutions_program_home.html

The new redesign in most networks is to have L3 inter-switch links instead of L2 inter-switch links to avoid any STP issues.

Please take a moment and read a couple of documents that matches your requirement and come back and ask more questions about 'finalizing' a design.

HTH,

__

Edison.