Typology I have started first with the typology. Up until now every switch stack I had dealt with was daisy-chained together in a bus or ring typology which for obvious reasons did not seem ideal to me as frames might have to traverse through every switch in the stack depending on the destination and a single switch failing would cause the whole thing to break. So, I have been using a 2 tier Spine & Leaf typology with each core connecting to each access switch so even in the even of failure all connectivity is not lost. I have upgraded to switches with multiple 10gbit fiber uplinks for better throughput as well as all 10gbit core switches for faster connectivity to servers. All of my connections to servers are using LAG groups to achieve 20 Gbit.
Subnet VLANs I am creating separate subnet vlans for management, backup, production and wireless for now so that I have smaller broadcast domains. Not sure what else I can do in this area.
Spanning Tree I am planning to use port fast and BPDU guard which I believe disables spanning tree on any of the ports and blocks traffic from other switches. This should reduce the amount of spanning tree traffic as I have read that spanning tree can consume as much as 40% of all the traffic on a LAN! I also need to make sure I correctly configure the root bridge.
iSCSI I am planning to dedicate a separate switch for this traffic as I have read that it creates a lot of broadcasts. Many articles have suggested having this on separate switch is better than just putting it on its own VLAN subnet.
NetBIOS I have read that NetBIOS sends out a broadcast every 30 seconds be default and with a lot of Windows clients on the network I would imagine this would create a lot on unnecessary chatter. DNS can and should do everything that NetBIOS does and I have had it turned off on test machines for long periods without any issues.
Measuring performance How can I accurately measure the before and after performance of my switch stack? According to documentation ping is not a good measure as it is given the lowest possible priority. I can look at the CPU load on the switch but I was hoping for a better measurement tool.
Progressing in Networking I realize that maybe I am doing overkill with my setup but I have taken CCNA course and it pains me to not try and apply the few things I do know. I know that if I don't apply this knowledge it will get lost and I will never really progress to the next level.
Thoughts and Discussion If there is anything that you see that I am missing or forgetting please let me know! Or if you see anything I am doing that seems stupid/unnecessary please explain why or send me a link that explains. I'm hoping this can be a good gateway towards getting our LAN networks to the next level. I have seen so many small medium sized LANs and many have been pretty disappointing setups where everything is just daisy chained and no VLANS, and all settings are at default.
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