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Best way to set this up.

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by realm master 1 view

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this is what I have, what is the best way to connect it all of them together?
I have one Cisco 7500 router and 2 core Cat 6500 switches; I need two networks one .com the other .net. I do not want the traffic from the net side to interface with the.com side the .com side is the adman business side. I know Acls on the router will handle that part, but what I need is the best way to setup the system so I will have the most bandwidth per each side. The .net side will be hosting.
This is all hooked up to a T1 line from Sprint.

10 replies

by meganetcomputers

How many PCs are we talking about? Do the two 6500 switches have enough ports to support each side if you were to use one switch for the admin and one for the other? You could do it via the ACL and you could also bust them up via subnets. If you need further assistance you can e-mail me directly.

by realm master

The switches have enough ports to support what I have now. What I need to know is the best way to connect them to the router for the best network speed.

by meganetcomputers

The best way, if you have the cards available, would be gigabit copper or fiber to the switches from the router. Then set up static routes to each network because the admin cost of a static route is lower than that of rip or other dynamic routing. The CPU in the router will then work less and you can get the most out of it.

by ckilday

Why not let the router decide? If you establish an ethernet connection on the router for each network (.com & .net), all you should need to do is put in a default route for your internet traffic that points to the T-1. That way, the router will handle traffic on a first-come first-served basis. As you have already noted, you will have ACL's to keep the networks separate. Unless you have a requirement to allocate bandwidth or priority, it's usually easier to let the router handle it on its own.

Just out of curiosity, have you considered HSRP? With two 6500 switches and two networks, you might want to consider physically distributing your users across both switches using VLANS and inter-switch links (ISL) so that in case of a hardware failure on a switch, half of your company wouldn't lose computer access.
Best wishes,
- ck

by ckilday

Something I forgot to mention. You've certainly got the speed on the switches and router to support 100 Mbps connections, but you might want to limit the connection to the router to 10 Mbps full-duplex so that the switch handles some of the buffering instead of making the router handle it all. You are, after all, choking everything down to 1.54 Mbps. Hope this helps. - ck

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