VLAN Design Help

[Phobos1821]

A little information about my network. It is about 70 workstations, and 14 servers. We have 6 switches, a firewall, and a border router with a CSU/DSU.

I have heard multiple arguments regarding vlan design, and trunking. Most support the Cisco's way of designing networks. Core - Distribution - Access. This meaning that all switches have their own VLANs to reduce broadcast traffic by utilizing subnets to segment colission domains.

How many switches per router is the norm for distribution level? I would need the VLANs to be able to talk to each other so I would probably have to setup static routes on a multihomed router to facilitate communication between the different subnets. In this scenario, what type of Cisco Router product would I look into purchasing to route traffic between VLANs, that would handle about 7-8 switches? I'm thinking of having a design something like this

Border Router
Firewall
Distribution Router
.1
Switch Switch Switch Switch
.2 VLAN 10 .3 VLAN 20 .4 VLAN 30 .5 VLAN 40
Gateway .1 Gateway .1 Gateway .1 Gateway .1

I would use the distribution router to converge the network by adding static routes on all the switches and the router for all subnets. Would this work as intended, or are there any caveats?

 

[vipergg]

Well Cisco has kind of blurred the lines with the equipment that they are putting out now which includes layer 2 -4 functionality , case in point something out of the Cat 4000,5000 ,or 6000 series . These switches can do routing , switching and even support serial links for WAN attachments . If you take something like a 4500 series , you can define all your vlans on it and it will route between all of them if you have the correct supervisor card. There is no hard rule of how many vlans these will support . In one of our environments we have 6500's with msfc's supporting 70 different vlans and it's really not working that hard because most of the traffic is hardware switched and never even hits the cpu .

 

[vipergg]

If you just have a routing protocol turned like rip or ospf you don't need any static routes it will know how route between your vlans . turn on routing protocol , add network statements on dist. router , that's about it .