Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Re-thinking my core switch for a police department, looking for input

Our police department currently has a single Aruba 5400 series with dual mgmt modules and dual power supplies serving as the LAN core for the facility. I got some budget to replace it this year, and I am looking for some suggestions for a more redundant approach.

Most of our smaller city buildings have a single Aruba 3810M with dual power supplies and 4 SFP+ module serving as the core switch, with a 40gb trunk back to our WAN core. This is fine for most buildings, as our remote sites don't have any on-site infrastructure and really only handle distribution. There are a few obvious points of failure with these, the chassis, the fiber module, etc...

The PD is now one of our two critical datacenters where our virtual environment resides, and ideally I want no single-points-of-failure here. I'm wondering how others handle something like this and what you all would suggest I do here.

At this point I am leaning towards doing a stack for the core - maybe two 5400s. Is there a better way?

I realize this is a loaded question, here's some relevant information, but feel free to ask for any other info:

  • Our WAN is routed via BGP
  • The PD site has 4 fibers for the backhaul to our WAN core (single trunk)
  • We need Aruba hardware
  • We don't need a whole lot of ports on the core, really just fiber uplinks to a few distribution stacks and a fiber uplink to the top-of-rack switches for the VM hosts. So, stacking two 5400s feels like overkill in terms of ports/modules.
  • Something modular is ideal so we can replace them in production if needed
  • Want to avoid VRRP, would prefer to have a single router with stacking redundancy, but feel free to change my mind

How would you approach this?



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