Building a New Network Design for the Lab. Back in the old days, I created a network for my home lab. It was a single subnet and was without VLANs. This was because I did not have a switch capable of doing such things, and I was not really focused on the network design. Shame on me. Fast forward  to a few weeks ago, when I decided to change things and come up with a better design. I tickled Twitter to see if anyone might be interested in documentation on what I did, and some folks seemed to dig the idea, so here we go. At the very least, its nice to write this down for my own records in case I forget why I did something. Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNets sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. InformationWeek. com News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peertopeer knowledge sharing. Engage with our community. Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology ICT solutions provider, we have established endtoend advantages in telecom networks, devices. View and Download 3Com 3CBLSG48 user manual online. Baseline Switch 2948SFP. CBLSG48 Switch pdf manual download. STAY CONNECTED. Locate your product code in the boxes below to go to your product support page for information on the latest drivers, firmware, and upgrades. Kiwi-CatTools-Standard-Edition_4.png' alt='3Com Network Director Software' title='3Com Network Director Software' />At a high level, I wanted to address these functional requirements Stop using VLAN1 for all devices, both physical and virtual. Create discrete networks for major traffic types in the lab and at home. Eliminate network subnet collisions with my work VPNIsolate wireless devices. Allow for greater growth, scale, and general robustness of the network. List of well known, registered, and dynamicprivate ports. Com Network Director Software' title='3Com Network Director Software' />The design should be simple to understand and maintain. Use existing hardware if at all possibleI came up with these design elements to address the requirements Migrate all devices off VLAN 1. Create a series of unique VLANs for Home, Wireless, Servers, v. Motion, NFS, and Other traffic. Migrate from 1. 0. Put Wireless on its own subnet and VLAN. Splitting Home, Wireless, and Servers into discrete networks significantly increases usable IP space. Heres a rough history of how it went down. Sketching the Network Topology. I started with a rough sketch of what I wanted it to look like while keeping my functional requirements in mind. Whiteboards rock Dont mind the blurry part, it isnt anything top secret it just has nothing to do with my drawing, so I fuzzed it out. I kept things pretty simple. My Layer 3 switch, an HP V1. G, would be the VLAN aggregation point. Pretty much everything outside of the lab will be VLAN 1. VLAN 1. 5 wireless. The wireless AP operates in bridged mode, which really just extends the network segment to wireless devices. Com Network Director Software' title='3Com Network Director Software' />Management Glen Lavigne President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. Mr. Glen Lavigne is a business development professional with 25 years of international. AS0 Reserved ASAS1 LVLT1 Level 3 Communications, Inc. AS2 UDELDCN University of Delaware AS3 MITGATEWAYS Massachusetts Institute of Technology. HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR HRDMAG. COM. SG ISSUE 3. 1. HOT LIST The whos who of HR 2017. UNDER ATTACK HRs role in preventing data breaches. HRDS 3. 01Coverspine. The Official BlackBerry Press Room. Discover the latest BlackBerry news, learn about events and explore product release information. Com Network Director Software' title='3Com Network Director Software' />Every VLAN except for v. Motion has a switch virtual interface SVI to get from place to place. VLAN 5. 0 the one marked Other will just be for random things I want to play with in isolation. I might use it as a DMZ or as a lab zone Im not sure yet but I like the idea of having a something else bucket. Every upstream SVI or routed interface is using a. I felt that creating additional VLANs for Fault Tolerance, ESXi management, and so on was over complicating the design for no real gain. If needed, i. SCSI can share the NFS network, especially since my Synology NAS devices are not capable of creating VIFs. Also, I dont use i. SCSI. Heres a Visio fied version of the network diagram from a high level And here is a more physical look at the configuration Note All trunk ports are using native VLAN 9. I call this my black hole VLAN. Routing Tables. To get traffic out of my network, I created a small 2. At the time of my design, it was an Untangle 1. I have plans to shift into a new Meraki MX6. W in the near future check out this You. Tube video of me unboxing an MX6. W. The switch default gateway is pointed at the router firewall interface. Heres the routing table on my layer 3 switch for clarification Each SVI also has an IPv. A few hours later, the network design above has been implemented. I now have a lot of empty networks and have validated that routing works between them. Ive also placed a test workload in each subnet and made sure it can hit the web, other networks, and other devices. Thumbs up. DHCP, And Lots Of It. I hate managing IP addresses, and my lab is small enough that I rarely care to use a tool. I only have about 4. I decided to add a new goal to my list Shift to DHCP for IP assignment, use reservations when required, and rely on DNS updates for A record and PTR records. Use redundant DHCP High Availability in Windows 2. Eric Shanks has a good write up on DHCP HA on his blog. I created new DHCP scopes for each subnet that would need dynamic IP assignments. The scope of each subnet starts at. I can also easily eyeball an IP and see if it is coming from DHCP or not. I used Scope Options to set the router, NTP, DNS, and domain identities as shown below. I am putting the DHCP High Availability requirement on hold until I migrate my domain controllers to Windows 2. R2. Rather than multi homing my DHCP server, I used DHCP Relay settings on my layer 3 switch to pass along the DHCP discover messages to the appropriate server. The VLANs highlighted below are able to receive offers. After a bit of effort, theres now a bunch of new networks and the ability to use DHCP to assign addresses within them. To validate, I plopped down a device on each VLAN and made sure it received an IP address. Once this was done, I moved on to the next step. Roland Software For Milling. DNS Points the Way. DNS is important in many network situations, but for a DHCP fueled environment, it was critical to have a healthy configuration. I went through my AD integrated DNS config and created reverse lookup zones for every VLAN that would need a name space. The reverse lookup records, or PTR records, are also required by some software installations. I also spent time validating that devices with DHCP addresses had matching DNS records with a recent update stamp. Next Steps. At this point the infrastructure pieces are completed. The network underlay is ready to receive my various devices and servers. Ill craft up an additional post that covers the migration of IP addresses to the new networks including v. Center Server and my ESXi hosts in the near future as time permits. If you have questions, found an error, or just generally wanted to comment on this lab architecture, feel free to drop a note below.