Please help me understand a couple of things about my network, layer 3 switching, and VLANS.. I’m confused as hell about this stuff for some reason, I usually grasp such concepts so it’s frustrating. We had a network which was entirely Layer 2 in nature, but then one switch that went bad and started screaming took the entire network down to it’s knees… Being that this is a hospital we have flagged one segment of this network as “critical” and wish to protect it from such network storms. Problem is that it must be able to contact a few of the same servers and services as the rest of the network.
Most of the network is running on managed Layer 2 switches that are VLAN enabled and I do have two layer 3 switches available.. What would you all recomend for my VLAN configuration and placement of two available Layer 3 switches to protect the critical portion of the network from everything else without loosing the connection to the servers?
If I had a storm on the noncritical portion of the network would it cripple the servers as well? Can I stop that possibilty with layer 3 switches when the servers have to be on all VLANs?
Thanks 🙂