[nsp] hardware

[Jon Lewis]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Shaun R wrote:

> Thanks for your reply.  My main concern in this design is to make sure that
> I have room for growth.  I don't want to implement something that's going to
> give me problems when I double/triple my customer base.  That's why I was

We just did this (just?..around a year ago) and chose to use 3550-48's as
the aggregation switches (deployed in or around the customer racks).  At
the moment, we're also using 3550-48's as the core swithes.  Right now,
the agg switches have 100mb back to the core switches which then have FEC
into the routers.  At some point in the future, the core 3550's will be
replaced with gigE switches, the agg switches will get gigE uplinks to the
core, and the FEC from the core switches to the routers will go gigE.

> It sounds like the switches I have chosen are a good choice.  I am still
> concerned about how I am doing to do the subnet/vlan'ing.  It seams like if
> I had say 1000 customers, and a sub interface for each customer/subnet that
> it would be a huge pain in the ass to manage.  I mean the config would be
> huge.

Why do a vlan for every customer when you can run their switchport in
layer3 mode?  We only do vlans when necessary.  i.e. MPLS VPN vrfs,
customer insists on having multiple systems in the same subnet.  The
latter one I suspect could have been done with BVI interfaces on the
3550s, but I didn't think to test that pre-deployment, and I knew vlans
would work...and we had to do some of them anyway.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis                   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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