Case Study Need help and sugestions

jeremy8529jeremy8529 Member Posts: 57 ■■□□□□□□□□
I was asked to design a network for a practice case study for the 1st floor of a hotel/convention center. You have a main lobby which can represented by a circle and two wings that are directly opposite of each other. Each wing is 485ft long with 35 rooms per wing. What I have planned on doing is this:

First, I would bring in at least a 54mbs cable connection from the outside( might need a faster one) from the main router, I would run a gigabit Ethernet connection to my web server which I will have behind a DMZ created by a firewall, (alt idea, run it a separate WAN connection to save bandwidth and separate it completely from the inside. still use a firewall of course

Second, I would run fiber optical connections to the switches in the switch rooms, which will be built inside of the employees only area in the middle of the wings. (locked inside of a secure closet)l. The fiber optic will run about 125 meters from the main router to each wing. (If the distance is actually around 75M, I would probably go with a aggregated gigabit Ethernet connection using ether channel between the router and switch over cat6)

Third, I would run Cat6 from the switches in the switch rooms to all of the guest rooms on the respective wings, and create a VLAN for each room for security and to break up the broadcast domains. To much overhead maybe?

Fourth, I would place a wireless AP inside of the lobby of the hotel,(gigabit Ethernet connection) to provide guest with mobile connection. (I would probably use 802.11N/G for the connection, what I don't know is the best way to secure it. I could use WPAV2 but what about key distro?)

Finally, if the budget allows for it, I will install wireless repeaters between the lobby and the wings to extend the wireless to the rest of the floor. For my routing protocol, I would probably use OSPF mainly because it is scalable and it calculates routes based on bandwidth. Also, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I would DHCP for all of the IP address management except for our hardware and web server which would be assigned static IP addresses.


So tell me how you think I did? Suggestions? I am competing against other high school students and we are given 20 minutes to design a network based off of a case study. I need help picking out the actual hardware to use and estimating a price. Of course if I am using ether channel, I know I will have to use cisco devices.

Comments

  • dynamikdynamik Banned Posts: 12,312 ■■■■■■■■■□
    What's the web server for? Any reason you have to do that in-house?

    You might want to keep cost in mind. Will you users need that sort of internal bandwidth? I've never used 10mbps while staying at a hotel, let alone gigabit. Most people will be checking email or news, and maybe slightly more bandwidth-intensive sites like Youtube or Hulu.

    A lot of hotels are still running on 10mbps hubs. Security concerns aside, that often provides ample bandwidth (I'm obviously not recommending you do that, but it puts things in perspective).

    VLAN per room seems over the top, and I never see that done anywhere I stay. That would provide a great deal of security for your clients, and would probably be considered a best-practice. As you said though, what about management? That's just the first floor; is it feasible to do that for the entire building? Maybe compromise and do a VLAN per floor.

    Most hotels have wireless everywhere. You might want to consider multiple APs running off of a wireless controller. You'd position them and configure the channels as shown in the second image here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/i/100001-200000/130001-140000/135001-136000/135106.jpg (might be slightly different based on the flavor of 802.11 you decide to go with, but the same concept applies). PSKs are usually just handed out to guests as they register.

    Are you going to be responsible for other things or just the networking? Are you going to have publicly accessible PCs in a business center that you're going to need to lock-down and manage? Are you putting any kind of bandwidth/firewall controls in place to make sure people don't abuse your bandwidth by downloading torrents or using other p2p software?
  • jeremy8529jeremy8529 Member Posts: 57 ■■□□□□□□□□
    I could certainly outsource the web server; I have no reason to keep it in house and that is probably the best thing to do.

    Now what would the repercussions of me using VLAN per room be? Would it bog down the switches, or would it just be a nightmare to configure? I am thinking it might be a good idea to place just the one wing or floor on its own separate VLAN.

    I will defiantly go for entire wireless coverage of the hotel now, considering how relativity cheap the APs are.

    I am only supposed to be responsible for the networking aspect of the case study, so I believe that including the computer lab would be outside of the scope of the problem, but I think it would be a good idea to let the judges know that it could be done for sure. Locking them down could be done easily with steady state. Now, for the non bandwidth whoring measures would be a great idea, thanks! How would I do that, with an application layer firewall, or would I be able to handle that by configuring the router to not allow connections to torrent sites?

    I don't know if maybe I wasn't clear in the first post or if maybe i'm missing something, but the gigabit connections were meant for the backbone not for access layer, are they still excessive with that consideration? The only reason why I went with the cat6 was because it is relatively cheap and it should be good for years. Now, for the WAN connection, do you think that 54mbs would be enough? We can expect about 75 host per floor and they designate an unspecified amount of floors. Perhaps I would need a bigger pipe, any suggestions?


    Thanks!
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