Hello,
We have been making some major changes and upgrades to our networking and I was hoping to get some ideas and best practices for the redesign.
As it stands, the previous admin set up a Barracuda NG firewall and has been using it as a firewall and core router. We have multiple /24 networks set up and the FW is routing between them all - also note there are NO VLANs today.
172.16.1.X/24 is the main data network (all devies)
172.16.2.X/24 is the voice network (all IP phones)
172.16.3.X/24 is the wifi network
We have 7x Dell PowerConnect 6248 layer 3 switches on hand and I want to introduce VLANs and move routing from the FW to the switch(es).
I plan to have the same networks above but in a configuration like this:
10.0.0.0/30 - Network between the NGFW and Switches
172.16.0.0/24 - Servers/Management/Printers - VLAN 100
172.16.1.0/24 - Workstations (there are 240, all static IP) - VLAN 10
172.16.2.0/24 - IP Phones - VLAN 20
172.16.3.0/24 - WiFi - VLAN 30
Now, when it comes to the Dell switches - they can be stacked (all have stacking modules and cables). I'm hoping you guys can help...
Should I stack all 7 of the switches together? I'm not sure if I can enable routing on just one of the switches in the stack, or if it impacts all 7 of them?
Would I be better off designating one of the 6248's as a core switch/router and uplinking the others to it? I'm guessing I could still stack the other switches in the configuration I need for each subnet and uplink to the core switch/router?
I will also be using 2 PoE Brocade FastIron 24 port switches for the 172.16.2.0/24 network, so I know these will need to be uplinked (depending on the advice given for the above scenario).
Thanks in advance for any insight you guys can offer!