Exercising with some work switches.

One of my last tasks at work before I stop, is to create a new switched network for a location in Estonia. It will be a 10 switch network. The company is reusing two 3560 switches which I still need to receive.

However, I got 8 new switches today, all 2960 switches, one of them being a 2960G switch, which is a very nice L2 switch. I just finished setting them up on my desk so I can start configuring them. It will be good practice with some switch commands. I need to know from the project manager what features he wants to use on them considering the requirements of the topology.

Among these are:

  • DAI (Dynamic ARP Inspection).
  • IGMP snooping, whether multicast is required on the network, I am not sure if Microsoft’s configuration manager supports mcast.
  • Security level for administrators. (Views).
  • Vlan assignment, included in this is whether or not to use VTP.
  • What sort of logging thats required.
  • What spanning-tree requirements there are, placement of root switch and so forth.
  • Portchannels, how many links and what sort of load balancing methods will be used, this will depend on the VMware ESX server setup.

Heres a picture I took for the fun of it. (Sorry about the quality (iPhone camera really sucks)).

2960  Cisco  Switch