Setting up Muliple Subnets

[mgierach]

Hello,
Hopefully somebody out there can help a newbie a bit. I have been in a position of convenience for my company and had built a single segment LAN a while ago when it was good enough for our needs. Good and bad, but we have grown to the point where the traffic from our graphics department is killing the bandwidth for our normal office users. To make a long story somewhat short, I was thinking that I could split this network (domain) into two subnets so that the traffic from the graphics department is no longer pulling bandwidth from the office. First, is this the right direction to go? Second, I was hoping to setup a Win2k Server to handle the routing of this process, and I am having troubles wiht the setup. I will have 2 DCs (one on each side) running Windows Server 2003, and the only traffic really that I need to make sure can be accessed by all users is our Exchange server. Any help or if you have articles you could point me to, I would appreciate it. Thank you.

Marc

 

[RobBoberts]

If you put the graphics people on their own subnet the trafice between the graphics people would stay on their own subnet.

I have not used a win2k server as a router, but I hear it is possible to do.

Televison will make radio obsolete.

 

[precioustony]

Install Routing and Remote Access on the Windows 2000 server (make sure you have two network cards on it), during configuration choose custom installation and enable LAN routing. Assign different classes of IP address to the two network cards, this will give you two different segments. Connect the graphics dept to one of this segement and the rest of the office to the other. I hope this helps

 

[mgierach]

Yes, I have that setup completed, but the thing I am having some troubles understanding are what kinds of controls are really in place with this to control the traffic. At that point, is the physical connection the control along wiht the subnet addressing? I can see and communicate across the routing server, but is this method really the answer to segment the traffic that both sides of the company are generating? Also, one interesting thing I did notice. On the front subnet, when browsing "My Network Places", I can only see the front office and the router in there (the lab only has those two for the front office testing right now). However, from the graphics side, I can see botht he front side systems as well as the graphics side systems. Is this the expected behavior? Thanks for the help!

 

[ashpp]

Hi Migerach,

Need to know more about your infrastructure ie. are you using switches, gigabytes NICs etc to answer the question of whether subnetting is the right thing.

 

[mgierach]

Sure thing. We are using a switched environment with all servers using Gig NICs. The DC's are not multi-homed (I read that this is not a smart move), and neither is the Exchange server. I have multiple NICs in the other servers on the network that are set up with trunking on the switches. In the past, I could put out enough bandwidth to support the whole company under one subnet, but now the traffic from graphics has caused a slow down for all other users as well. My goal is to keep the graphics department running with th4e same backplane that they have now, but segment them from the rest of the office so that their traffic does not interfere with the office applications. If you need more information, just let me know. Thanks!