@Vince-Whirlwind wrote:
I just read the datasheet on the Cisco 300s, they look pretty good. I haven't bought Cisco for any customer for years though, as you get much better bang for your buck with almost any other vendor. Compare prices with the HP2930, which is better than the Cisco300.
Looking at your wiring closet, it looks like you have almost 200 desks, although you only have half as many phones, so maybe there is a heap of patching on those black patch panels that doesn't need to be? Or maybe you also have a bunch of analog phones patched in elsewhere? I must say I don't understand what these "PoE" things are - they can't be power injectors or there would more patching coming out of them - are they simply switches?
The first thing you could do is to halve the amount of wiring by patching the PCs through the phones, like VoIP was designed to be deployed.
You will have to learn how to manage VLANs.
A basic VLAN plan would be to have 6 VLANs:
VLAN10 - Data, all your users' PCs, untagged on all the Access switch ports
VLAN20 - Voice, all your phones, tagged on all the Access switch ports
VLAN30 - Servers, all your servers, not spanned to any other switches
VLAN100 - Management, all your network switches have an IP address on this VLAN so you can telnet or https to them for management.
VLAN200 - Edge, connectivity to your gateway environment/firewall.
VLAN99 - black hole VLAN, add it to the inter-switch links as the untagged VLAN. Do not put any IP addressing on it on any switch.
You configure these VLANs on the "Cores", add all VLANs to the inter-"Core" links, add in IP addressing on both "Cores" (If they don't stack, use VRRP), enable VLANs as needed on the local ports, then span VLANs out as appropriate to the other switches.
In the process, that cable mess can be sorted out.
Also, you should be able to reduce your switch requirement down to 2? 3? or maybe 4? 48-port Access switches and 2xCores. Even fewer if you patch some Access layer connections directly to a "Core" - on your size network, this is probably a good option to save having to buy too many switches.
The rackspace this frees up can be inserted between the black patch panels so you can manage the patch cables better.
We have about 40 people overall, but there are many desks with multiple ports.. conference rooms, flex rooms, front areas, various other spots in the office.. its adds up to 192.. then there is a "voice" port for each desk.. these goto the POE Netgear 24 port switches x 3 in the pic and diagram. For some reason the communication company that did our phones did it that way originally, i think in a vlan on the netgears.. still havent gotten that far in re-checking things.
We use ip office 500 and avaya phones.. i'm not sure how the pc's would patch into those "voice" lines if we could merge switches and get all POE switches I assume.. or do you mean get enough to cover 72 phone / voice cat 6's and the rest of the 192, all POE, with a core switch.
Yes it appears vlans is the direction i should be going.. issue is.. the downtime i can invest in this is probably limited to a saturday and into early sunday worst case. Already figuring it will take me a good part of a day just to rewire (and more properly tag each cable this time)... i have 10 foot cables coming (200) as well as velcro ties and i'm getting rid of the verticle teeth manager on the right and putting a 6 foot manager on left and right that are "open" air with the ring style instead.
But in doing the vlans.. if all of this was merged per say.. is it safe to assume i'm just as well off with one core (and a hotspare under it ready to plugin when needed if it dies)? As was mentioned, it sounds as if the cisco's cant be stacked.
I've also seen it suggested to use purely stackable switches.. like Hp Procurve 2900? (i cant seem to find pricing/info on this).. where all of them as a unit would have one management ip address and server as a core router for all networks (unsure on this last part).. then with various vlans as mentioned here. I think i saw that a dell powerconnect 6248p would work (cant find much on this either).. i'm assuming these are POE stackable switches and maybe thats what i should look up, unsure..
Or just go the easy route, which is likely prefered by the local company.. cisco switches.. one at the core, one spare.. and the satelite ones (mix of the cisco and the remaining "good" dlinks and or hps).
Wouldnt the vlan live on various switches, not just the core, though the servers all being on the core, since there are only 48 ports.
Does stacking like with a procurve stackable 2900 still require having dual output sets of ethernet from each server, one to each core switch i assume.. or in the case of stacking 2900s ?without a central core? does that change things (the picture i saw didnt really seem to suggest it had a core)