Hello all
Am just looking for any tip or ideas on how to best design the following....
We have a large factory site spread over about 10 acres, there are about 6 different major buildings (areas), this factory has grown over time and we are looking to have a overhaul of the design. What we have at the moment is one large collapsed core architecture with about 20 Vlans. All the areas are are connected via fibre back to a central comms room in one building. The core switching is a pair of 3750's. We also run a pair of wireless controllers one a 2500 and the other one a virtual controller. Wireless is critical to the operations around the factory and many of the hand helds we use roam between buildings.
What we would like to do is move to a multilayer network design with each of the areas around the factory connected via layer 3 links, and put layer 3 (3750, or 3850) switches in each of the sites. This will allow us to reduce the risk of spanning tree issues causing problems that can affect the entire site (we have a couple of issues with this in the past).
Our problem is what to do with wireless. We want to keep all our mobile devices so they can easily roam between buidings. We don't want them to connect to a different vlan and need to aquire a different IP address each time they roam. Sometimes a handheld in one building will actually connect to an AP in another building site. So to solve this we think we need to have a large flat wireless vlan that spreads across the entire factory.
Given that we want multi layer but we want wireless to be "flat" we thoguht the best way would be to:
setup all our sites with a layer 3 distribution switch
configure our wired voip and data vlans at each site on different subnets
configure the uplinks on the site distribution switches as trunk ports and only allow the wireless vlan, and the vlan that we use for inter site routing.
The another benefit of doing the above woudl be that it woudl allow us to put a controller in two differnet physical sites, to protect against the complete failure of the site where the two controllers are currently physically located (will also need some HSRP work for gateway of wireless vlan)
For price reasons we are probably limited to 37 or 3850 switches.
What does everyone reckon about this? any ideas or suggestions woudl be greatly appreciated. Perhaps there are better ways of doing this?
Thanks, Simon.
