Remote office LAN configuration advice

[mchiaravalle_2]

HI,

Looking for some opinions, advice or best practices on our remote office LAN configurations.  We have 16 basically identical sites.  Within the last year we have started deploying VoIP at these locations by adding them to our Call Manager, and soon we will probably deploy wireless at these sites by adding them to our central wireless controller with the H-REAP model.

My concern is that over time our simple access router and switch configs have been modified by various network engineers just to get things working, but not necessarily the best practice; or maybe they are.

Attached are the abbreviated configs and diagram of our typical 1 router, 2 switch VoIP site without any wireless H-REAP stuff yet.  I'm primarily concerned with the routing, and switching vlans and connectivity from switch 2 back to the router should switch 1 fail.

Thanks

mlc

[mchiaravalle_2]

HI,

Didn't get any takers over at "Getting started with LANs..." so I moved the thread to here.

Thanks

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello Mchiaravalle,

>> I'm primarily concerned with the routing, and switching vlans and connectivity from switch 2 back to the router should switch 1 fail.

I agree. With current configuration and connections if switch1 fails, switch2 will be isolated

You have an unused FE on the C2811 you should connect it to a free port on switch2, the port could be configured as access port in vlan 180.

You can run a VRRP group on switch1 and C2811 to provide a redundant default gateway to switch2.

Better, you could use a dynamic routing protocol on all three devices.

To be noted that the C2811 would still be a single point of failure

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[mchiaravalle_2]

Hi giuslar

Thanks for responding.

Yes I was thinking to turn up eigrp and / or rip on these devices.  Connecting switch 2 to the second fe on the router is possible because they are unused.  What do you think of the transit vlan182?  Should I keep it?

Thanks

[Giuseppe Larosa · Accepted solution]

Hello Mchiaravalle,

ideally if you revert to 3 point to point Layer links between the router and the two switches you keep away STP from the picture but you should use different client vlans on the two switches, if you need a L2 trunk between them one vlan more or less makes no great difference

use the unused FE on the C2811

Hope to help

Giuseppe