HSRP best practice

[dufrjulien]

Hi,

I am wondering which of these 2 configurations would be best to offer high availability gateways for a customer's office.  

I have a working setup right now consisting of 2 ISRs configured with HSRP as a proof of concept.  The question is what is the best solution to scale it up for production.  I will have a gigabit link between the customer's gateway and my gateway so that traffic from their LAN can be routed through my internet connection in the event of a failure in their isp's service or in their edge router.  

Option 1. 2 layer 3 switches ( cisco 3650 )

Option 2. 2 routers ( cisco 2911 )

I can provide more context if necessary.

Thanks for your help!

[Philip D'Ath · Accepted solution]

A Cisco 2911 is not likely to cope with 1Gb/s of load.  Highly unlikely.

If you need to do NAT, IPSec, or anything else like that you will need a router.  Probably something from the ISR 4000 series.

Otherwise use the Cisco 3650 switch.  It will flat link a Gb/s link with no issues.

[dufrjulien]

Thanks for the fast reply!

The only packet processing we need to do is vlan routing and trunking related so i'm thinking we will opt for the cheaper option between the ISR 4000 series routers and the catalyst 3650 switches.

[Philip D'Ath]

If you want a Gb/s of throughout, the 3650 will be substantially cheaper.

[dufrjulien]

Thank you again! 

We're going to go with the 2960-xr since we do not need some of the features the 3650 offer.

You've been very helpful!

[Philip D'Ath]

Double check the pricing.  In my country we never sell the 2960-XR's - because 3650's are cheaper.