Brian,
Thanks for the info, it has been very useful.
I am getting conflicting opinions regarding the use (or not) of VTP. Your reasoning seems the most persuasive at the moment.
Cisco's best practices paper appears to leave the decision up to the reader.
> Morning,
>
>
>
> With 250 devices, design, layout and implementation is critical and should
> be evaluated, corrected and adjusted as a first step.
>
>
>
> Personally I wouldn't use VTP regardless of how many VLANs are used. All
> switches would be configured to transparent including the core 6509's. >
>
>
> Regarding the VTP:
>
>
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> The proper way to do it/reconfigure everything is to begin furthest away
> from the core, on the access layer switches. Those should be set to
> transparent and only the vlans on that switch that are used should be
> configured on it. A switch knowing of "vlan 10" that doesn't have any
> clients in "vlan 10" on it is useless and severly degradates the performance
> of the network. When a switch is configured for a vlan, even with no clients
> in it on that vlan, that switch will go thru a STP calculation every single
> time a client comes live or reboots anywhere on that network which takes up
> process power and bandwidth.
>
>
>
> Once the access layer is taken care of you need to begin moving inward to
> the distribution layer, again, transparent and again only the needed vlans
> should be configured on those devices.
>
>
>
> Next step would be the core, if core 1 and 2 only feed devices on vlan 1,2
> and 3 then only those vlans should be on those switches. Obviously take into
> account any failover/HSRP that is being used. Again, with this size network
> I would use transparent.
>
>
>
> After everything is configured for transparent, everything is confirmed
> working and there are no problems you need to begin pruning. This is done in
> the core. An example of pruning would be, port g3/1 on core 1, this port
> only feeds clients on vlans 2 and 3, only vlans 2 and 3 should be allowed on
> that trunk.
>
>
>
> There is so much more to this than a simple post in a news group could ever
> take care of. It's obvious that you know how to work on/service an
> infrastructure, but do you know proper design techniques or best practices?
> I'm saying this as a general statement; most in-house engineers do not know
> real world design or implementation. They are typically grown from a PC/Help
> desk technician or are hired fresh out of school to work with a more
> experienced staff member within the network that they are servicing. There
> are obviously exceptions to this, there are several people here, within this
> NG that are, shall we say simply incredible. Unless you are one of those
> few, meeting with a well experienced VAR would greatly benefit you and your
> infrastructure.
>
>
>
> Hope this helped,
>
> -Brian