Thursday, May 24, 2018

What switches should I buy to replace our Cisco ones? [x-post /r/juniper]

I'm tasked with coming up with a plan to age a few aging Cisco switches in some of our branch offices.

Currently we are running 2 x 48 port PoE Cisco Catalyst 2960-s. We run them with a router on a stick design for inter-vlan routing and routing over our MPLS.

We are planning on getting rid of our MPLS in favor of an SD-WAN(really S2S VPN) solution, so we want to get rid of the routers to simplify our network design. So I am going to be doing some simple L3 routing on the switch I decide to purchase.

Most of the branches these will be going in are between 15 and 25 users. We have printers, video conference rooms, and other local networked devices as well.

At least 3/4 of the users in these offices work on CAD drawings, so they frequently open/save files that are anywhere from 20MB to 500MB or more, depending on the size of the project. We also have people opening Photoshop/Indesign files that can be 200-300MB each.

We also have WAPs that service a max of probably 30 devices in each office. We have a Cisco IP Phone system currently, but are looking into cloud based PBX options. I assume that the Cisco IP Phones will work just fine with these switches.

We also have some light infrastructure in each office: a VMWare host with a domain controller and a terminal service. We also have a NAS that the users pull their files off of.

Since we're currently using 2960's without any issues, I'm considering the Juniper EX2300-48P as it specs out about 3 times faster than the Cisco's we're using. If we don't have any issues with those, I don't think we need to go overboard.

I also looked at the Juniper EX3400-48P but it doesn't seem like I get that much more and I think it may be overkill for these small offices.

I'm going to configure the switch as the default gateway for each VLAN and then just use a few static routes to get traffic from the switch to the firewall and router for actual routing.

Will the EX2300 be sufficient in handling the traffic and light routing it'll be doing or should I look at sizing up a bit?

Thanks!



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