[179853] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Thousands of hosts on a gigabit LAN, maybe not
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jima)
Fri May 8 20:19:22 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Fri, 08 May 2015 18:19:04 -0600
From: Jima <nanog@jima.us>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20150508185303.55159.qmail@ary.lan>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On 2015-05-08 12:53, John Levine wrote:
> What's the rule of thumb for number of hosts per switch, cascaded
> switches vs. routers, and whatever else one needs to design a dense
> network like this? TIA
I won't pretend to know best practices, but my inclination would be to
connect the devices to 48-port L2 ToR switches with 2-4 SFP+ uplink
ports (a number of vendors have options for this), with the 10gbit ports
aggregated to a 10gbit core L2/L3 switch stack (ditto). I'm not sure
I'd attempt this without 10gbit to the edge switches, due to Rafael's
aforementioned point of the bottleneck/loss of multiple ports for trunking.
Not knowing the architectural constraints, I'd probably go with
others' advice of limiting L2 zones to 200-500 hosts, which would
probably amount to 4-10 edge switches per VLAN.
Dang. The more I think about this project, the more expensive it sounds.
Jima
