First of all excuseme for my ingnorance and my lack of english! I have 6 switches in my CPD, currently they are conected in a no-logical way, all of them are catalist 2950 with 2 Gigab. interfaces. One of them is connected to the router. So what is the best way to connect them ? Connect Switch 1 gigab. to Switch 2 gigab. Switch 2 to switch3 ... so they all have connected one giga to the router above and one to the router below ? Could this cause problems ? Any other suggerences.
It really depends on the type of traffic that you are going to have. If you are need high through-put and low latency, you would probably want to minimize the amount of switches that the traffic must traverse. In this way, you may want to setup a hierarchy, of sorts, and place servers and such optimally.
The worst case would be that you have them all chained together and a lot of traffic has to pass through all six switches to to what it needs to do. You don't want that.
For the optimal situation, you may want to a top switch that has servers, shared resources, and your router (call this layer 1). Then, have two switches connected to it (call this layer 2). This will leave you with three switches. Connect two of them with one switch from your "layer 2" and connect the last switch to the other "layer 2" switch (call this layer 3). Make sure that all of the inter-switch links are setup with matching manual speed/duplex settings. If possible, make sure that no shared resources are located on "layer 3" and limit the shared resources on "layer 2". If you have shared resources on "layer
2", make sure that they are strategically placed so that only clients from that leg off of "layer 1" are using those shared resources.
If you are just doing email, internet, and lite file sharing, it is unlikely a big deal, however.
If you have the budget, getting a distribution switch would be the most effective method. We have a 12 Gig port 3550 for just such a purpose. It has 10 GBIC slots and 2 RJ45 port that are all GigE. Then, just connect all of your switches and your router to it.
I am not sure if understand you right but you are looking for a recommended way to connect multiple switches to one router. I also assume your Router uses a Gig Interface to the Switches, otherwise using the Switch Gig ports for uplinks may be a moot point...
If this is correct, then there are 2 basic methods of doing this - 1. As a string of devices - Router ==> Sw1 ==> Sw2 ==> Sw3 ==> Sw4 ==> Sw5 ==> Sw6 This has a few negative aspects - Failing everything if say Sw1 died. As there is only one Router then this may not be too important. There are issues connecting more than about 7 switches in sequence like this. 2. Connect the switches into a Flat heirachy - Router ==> Sw1 and then run Sw2 - Sw6 directly of individual ports of Sw1. This reduces the connection sequences and the dependencies, except Sw1 becomes a critical component (like the Router). However it also can depend on what uplink speeds you really need. Perhaps purchase an additional 12 Gig port switch to do the aggregation.
It would depend on the depth of the stack and the traffic volumes, but basically, yes it should work.
I would go for a distribution switch with Gig ports to run all the
that's the fastest and simplest way, Thanks for your answers! I think will buy a gigab. switch. Now we have all the switches connected to sw1 and the usability is quite pooor
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