Redesigning core networking

Hi everyone,

We are working on refreshing our network infrastructure and implementing a redesign that will allow us additional flexibility and scalability in the future. This is more of a larger dev environment so we have the flexibility to take down the parts we need to make the changes when the time comes.

First we are upgrading all of our switches to latest gen hardware. One model we are looking at support a max of 2.5G on each port, but looking at enterprise networking ports on servers I'm not finding much of any that support that speed. The only places that I'm seeing 2.5G exists is in some residential stuff. Is 2.5G mostly marketing?

We are upgrading a portion of our core to at least 10G and maybe 40G if we can get the funding. This would mainly be supporting our virtual infrastructure that's running fully on 1GB at the moment.

Second, we are doing a major redesign of our VLAN methodology to get away from the hodgepodge of VLANs and to stop dumping the world onto VLAN 1. We are doing the mapping now to keep admin related traffic on a defined set of VLANs and then dev/production split out. Any major pitfalls to watch out for?

Any additional thoughts or comments are welcome since we are in planning and have plenty of time to make changes.