Hey gang.
I'm a newbie in the I.T world so try and tolerate my ignorance lol!
The company I work for has recently expanded and we have a shiny new building in place. Like 99% of companies, there are different departments within the building. There are physical data points as well as wireless access points for each department.
We have two Dell R720s running server 2012 (they will be replicating for tolerance), a layer 3 netgear switch and several netgear layer 2 switches hooked up to the patch panels.
I'm toying with the idea of VLANs for each department, each with their own subnet. So, let's say Purchasing is on vlan 2 with subnet of 192.168.2.0/24, and Design is on vlan 3 with subnet of 192.168.3.0/24.
I'm struggling to grasp where and how I could configure this. For the Design, would I look at the data points, i.e. 8-20, find the layer 2 switch they are connected to and configure those to be on a VLAN? Of course there will be instances when Design will need to communicate with other vlans, so can I trunk the layer 2 swtiches to the single layer 3 switch and set up routing between the two vlans? Or will all the switches have to be layer 3 for this to happen?
Additionally, when does the DHCP server/role on server 2012 come into play?
Another thing, the wireless access points will be managed with a controller (NETGEAR Wireless Controller WC7520), could I use Vlan tags to match the WAP to its corresponding vlan/subnet?
I think I've read too many conflicting things and my mind is fried. This is probably an extremely easy concept to grasp and I'm making it harder for myself. I just need pointing in the right direction, what steps to take if you will.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.