Access and Distribution/Core Switches

Turgon

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

These are, when you get down to it, hacks, to have to avoid an entire redesign. For awhile there was a movement to break up the huge layer 2 domains and move to a layer 3 routed model, since chomping your bandwidth in half thanks to STP blocking links was getting painful.

However, the requirements for layer 2 adjacency changed the entire paradigm, and now we employ a whole lot of new tech to make our networks appear to be flat layer 2 domains again. I find it quite amusing that we're developing and deploying new tech to take us back to where we were before.

And for the record, I'm with Vin. I much prefer to handle things like load balancing and my qos and such at layer 3, its a much bigger pain in the ass at layer 2, and the bottom line is that with a layer 2 domain, I end up having to sacrifice capacity for redundancy, which is something I don't have to do at layer 3.

But then, you can't move VM's around.

Figuring out creative solutions to this crap is why they pay folks like all of us the big bucks.

Unfortunatley the whole VM thing was never fully thought through in terms of impact. Now we are virtualisation happy we have to catch up.