Rebuild Network to Support 10 Gig and Growth

TL;DR: $25k budget to rebuild network infrastructure for up to 100 personnel and 12 hypervisors. New switches and WAPs. A firewall would be nice too. Wut do?

Hey all,

I'm hoping for some input on a network rebuild/redesign.

We're a small development shop. We have about 12 physical hypervisors running ~80 VMs, and 50 personnel. We are growing rather quickly, and are projecting 100 personnel in the next 3 years. We are also a government contractor and have security compliance requirements.

Currently, we have a handful of 'Cisco' SG300's for access and one as our core routing switch. This interfaces with a Sonicwall TZ400 firewall for internet access. We have a handful of Sonicpoint WAPs. Everything is gigabit ethernet.

This has started to slow things down as we grow - we move a lot of VMs around, and guys are moving big files to and from their workstations, sometimes over wireless.

My budget is $25,000, though I can pull an additional $5000 from a lesser priority project.

I'm looking to rebuild the network to support 10gig in between the switches and the servers, and support what we hope will become a 100 person company.

My initial plan (having worked with Aruba on this) was to get a couple of 2930F's.

The plan was to use 1-2 of the 4 SFP+ ports on each switch to uplink to whichever switch we chose to be the core for inter-VLAN routing. The remaining SFP+ ports would connect our most important/active Hypervisors, and then we could just continue running gigabit LAGs for the less important servers. Then, throw in a couple of IAP-305's for wireless, license everything for their management software, and we're looking at about $13,000 for the core network, which would leave me $12,000.

I've been reconsidering this plan, as I would rather have a more powerful core switch with all of the SFP+ ports we will need, and more throughput to switch all of the inter-VLAN traffic (excepting some VLANs which will forward to the firewall for tighter control).

So, I've now been looking at a similar lineup, only replacing 1 2930F with a 3810 w/ 24 SFP+ ports for the core switch. This buys us more room for growth, in my opinion, and at a price of $12,000, isn't super cost prohibitive. Additionally, I'm planning to upgrade the IAP-305s to 515's so we can take advantage of 802.11ax. I'd love to take advantage of SmartRate as well (we have Cat6 around the building), but the 2930M's w/ SmartRate are too expensive with the 3810.

This gets me almost immediately to my budget of $25,000.

Is this a solid plan? Am I missing something? Is there a better way to do this?