Our network has been rapidly expanding over the past 12 months, and what was once a blazing fast network is being bogged down with excessive broadcasts and misguided network traffic. I'm not an expert Cisco admin by any means, so please bare with me here. At the heart of our problem is that we have a slow link (54Mbps Wireless Bridge) between two buildings.
Building A is setup as follows:
35 Servers 50 Desktops T1 connected to a Cisco 2621 Router, conneted to a PIX 515 6.3(3), connected to a 2950T on a Trunking Port, two other Cisco 2950t's and 4 Dell 5324's (24 port GIGe Switches I bought to act as a fast backbone for server communication) connected to this .Interface Outside is a public IP, connected to the 2621 Router Interface DMZ is 192.168.2.0/24 VLAN 2 Interface Inside is 192.168.1.0/24 VLAN 1
Our web farm is on the DMZ/ VLAN 2, and all servers and clients in the entire company are on VLAN 1. The wireless bridge is also connected to VLAN 1.
Building B is setup as follow:
30 Desktops Just clients all plugged into cheap switches (read: may or may not do VLAN tagging). The other wireless bridge is plugged into one of these switches.What I would like to do is add two more VLANs. VLAN 4 for our servers, and VLAN 5 for Building B. My logic being that this will reduce broadcast traffic; eliminate traffic needlessly being transferred over the slow link when its target is in the same building. As well as confining server to server traffic to one VLAN for speed.
Now what I need to know is how to make the most of what I've got. I'm pretty certain I've got all the hardware I need. All I lack is the experience and knowledge to confidently put this puzzle together.
Add the VLANs and new Subnets to the "Inside" interface of the PIX. Then segment the switches accordingly. I would like to use the Dell
5324's for the servers, as they are GigE. If I set every port to be VLAN 4, and move the cable going from the PIX: Inside to the 5324 Trunking port, and then uplink from this port to the Cisco Switches, will I maximize my bandwidth? What I need to be careful to do is make sure that no server to server traffic is being routed through the pix, as it's obviously 100 base, and would eliminate any benefit from my GIGe hardware.Lastly, if you could help lay out the uplink structure you recommend, I'd REALLY appreciate it. An example: Dell Switches all ports VLAN4. Port 24 Trunk port connected to Cisco Switch. Wireless bridge plugged into trunk port on Cisco.
Thank you so much in advance for reading through my long post.