[c-nsp] What are people doing for thousands of 1Gbps ports in a single VLAN domain these days?

[Nick Hilliard]

Drew Weaver wrote:
> I've always loved the idea of a central configuration point for
> everything but obviously there used to be drawbacks to that
> convienience.

These days, the general wisdom is that the central configuration point
should be a database and that the network should be slaved to the
provisioning system, rather than maintaining the authoritative
configuration on the network itself. Large layer 2 domains have never
been a good idea.

In terms of technology, layer 2 overlay networks can also work well,
depending on your requirements.  Remote chassis and clustering configs
work fine, but will tend to result in vendor lock-in.  Depends on what
you're looking for, tbh, but there are lots of options, many of them
quite cost-effective.

Nick