3 switch network

How would you connect to them with-out an IP address?

I know that they would need IP addresses. My question was whether the IP scheme would work.

Thanks!

Well yes it would work. But it all depends what you are trying to do and how you are trying to do it. A common architecture is creating VLANs on one server switch, and trunking those to the switches that need it. One VLAN would be the 'switch vlan', where the switches are IPed and can communicate with each other. The other vlans would be for servers, nodes, or whatever you want to setup.

The other common architecture is each switch (presuming they all support layer 3 interfaces), owns its own vlan or set of vlans, and advertises the rest via layer 3 routing. The benefit to this is the elimination of spanning tree, as well as simplicity depending how your datacenter is setup. Basically, you would still have networks for the switches to communicate to each other, but none would be trunks and all would need to run a routing protocol. This also requires significant IP design as you would want to be able to summarize on each of the switches and avoid /24 networks being everywhere.

Sorry to go off on a tangent, but the simple answer is yes it can work, but it all depends how you are trying to design from a layer 2 and 3 perspective.........

Originally, I was thinking of making a "flat network" for this. So, Net1 (192.168.1.1), Net2 (192.168.1.2), and Net3 (192.168.1.3);

I really want to keep this network as simple as possible, but at the same time do not want to flood every network with unecessary traffics; thus thinking that by seperating the three networks into three seperate subnets (192.168.1.x, 192.168.2.x, 192.168.3.x) would help. Now, I didn't know that I would have to run any routing algorithm with this scenario. What would you suggest? EIGRP?

Hopefully I didn't just confuse you guys with that....

Thanks!

If I were you, I'd turn up all three networks on whichever switch is most 'central', and trunk the vlans to the other two where you can assign ports as necessary. If you don't like this model, and really want each switch to be its own network, then yes eigrp is a safe route. Rip would be ok too if there are no slow links and the network isn't going to grow into a large WAN with various speed links....up to you.

EIGRP is nice, but I think it's more or less overkill because EIGRP is designed for larger environments and needs more planning than simply install RIP. RIP on Cisco devices is very nice... router rip; network

As long as you don't need Cisco ACS Server everything is ok...