Issues designing cross-connecting network

[Jazz80813]

Hi All,

I am currently in a position of consolidating our backup solution between two seperate infrastructures, basically consolidate one infrastructure to use another. At the moment both infrastructures sit within the same Data Centre and racks are close by they will be connected using CAT6 cabling.

What we are trying to achieve using these CAT6 cross connects is to backup our secondary infrastructure using our primary infrastructure see the diagram attached.

At the moment all our servers (virtualised using vmware) are in seperate VLANs which terminate on there respective firewalls. So how would it be best for the storage server to communicate to the server at the secondary infrastructure?

Possible we have drafted are too:

1) create SVI's on each of the Catalyst Cisco 3750-X and configure static routes across the two for routing, this will involve creating static routes on each of the servers.

2) Create another interface on each the servers configured for a new vlan for these and this vlan is trunked across the switches down on the secondary down to the 2960 across to the stacked C3750-X where an SVI is terminated for the storage vlan. This is unlikely because the server team say the Windows Active Directery will not place nice with this type of setup but I am for this, as it will be VLAN'd off and not much work needed on the seconday network infrastructure or impacting production traffic flows as we have the traffic going down to the 2960 where only management connectivity is terminated,

3) Cross connect against the two cisco nexus's using vPC and create SVI's on each of the cisco nexus's but concern regarding broadcast storms and etc as they server production public accessibly traffic. We are using Cisco nexus 5548's on each side.

If their any better solutions such as PVLAN's let me know as this is starting to be rather troublesome to convince people which is the best option.

Thanks

Jazz

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Jazz

I can't really comment on 3) too much as i don't have direct experience with these.

Of the other two i also would go for 2) as i don't like adding static routes to servers etc.

I cannot see how this will impact AD as long as it is one vlan ie. there would be no need to modify the routing table because you would simply have another NIC for backup purposes. Unless AD has changed significantly from when i was last working with windows server guys we used to do this all the time ie.  a dedicated NIC for management/backup and had no issues.

As i say the main issue with that sort of thing was if the new NIC needs routes to get to other subnets but this is not the case here.

If your 3750 is running IP services you may also want to consider VRF-Lite for the SVI so that it is completely isolated from the global routing table.

I cannot see how PVLANS would be much help here to be honest although i rarely do so others may want to comment

Jon