linkling up several 2650's...how best?

[f2b]

Ok we have an office argument, which I hope you guys can clear up.

On this perticular site we have 12 procurve 2650's and all are cascaded off each other via the 1GB uplinks. All switches have 2 Vlans. Vlan 1 is for data and the 2nd vlan is for IP telephones. All seems to be working ok.

Is this ok or should we conect all 11 switches to a 1GB backbone switch as somebody has suggested? If so then how do we configure the 1GB switch?

Thanks

 

[LawnBoy]

IMHO, the suggested scenario would be more efficient, and has more aggregate bandwidth.

In your current setup - say a user on switch 12 is trying to get to a server or gateway on switch 1. His traffic is added to the traffic leaving switch 11, which is added to the traffic leaving switch 10, etc. etc. making it easy to have the gigabit link between switch 1 and 2 maxed out. The aggregate bandwidth for the stack is effectively 1 Gb.

If you connect all the edge switches to a core switch you avoid this bandwidth windup between switches. Now you will have an aggregate bandwith of 11 Gb. Just configure the appropriate VLAN tags on the core switch.

Does that make sense?

 

[f2b]

Thanks, it certainly does.

Because we are using voice and data on two vlans would the core switch need to be something like a 2824 as this is POE and 24 x 1Gb ports?

6 2650's are dedicatyed to voice and the other 6 for data only. Plug all 12 into the 2850, but after this I am unsure about how to configure them.

 

[LawnBoy]

Each port of the core switch would need a VLAN tag. The ports that are connected to the VOIP VLAN would be tagged for it, the ports connected to the data VLAN would be tagged for the other. Should be fairly simple to implement.

 

[f2b]

Thank you for the advice