7150-c12p, MOCA, and Campus Fabric-- oh, my!
Hi folks--
First off, thanks to Fohdeesha and all the forum folks as a result of whose work and words I've learned so much (at least, failed so much less!).
Second, I've trawled this thread a fair bit but haven't seen much discussion of campus fabric, which is today's puzzle.
Requests:
- Corrections for any of the below
- Suggestions on smarter/alternative ways to do it? Stupid/crazy but practicable ideas welcomed.
- Is this as simple as finding either a 7150 (to stack?) or a ... 7450? 7650? to serve as a CB?
Environment:
My house is rather hostile to 5ghz wifi and lacks ethernet and cell service but has cable TV jacks. Most of my network traffic is latency-sensitive, whether it's endless Zoom calls, VOIP/SIP traffic, SDR, etc. I do isolate IOT, guests, etc into VLANs.
I have a 6610 in the basement and a couple 7150-c12ps which I put in distant rooms, attached client devices and a POE AP, and home-run by way of individual pairs of MOCA bridges. And it's great, and mostly even works! but I've now got enough VLAN segmentation, firewall shenanigans, etc to want to manage the L2 switching fabric as one coherent unit. I'm tired of trunking vlans around on switch after switch each time I want to rewicker an experiment.
Obstacles:
- The network topology is hub-and-spoke; there will be no redundant links here. (Which rules out Stacking but should work with Campus Fabric mode, I think?)
- The 7150s will supposedly act as Port Extenders (which I read as akin to Cisco FEXes) if paired with a suitable (7150? 7x50?) Control Bridge, but my 6610 will not cut the mustard.
- The 7150s do not support the 2.5gbps ethernet the MOCA bridges offer; so I'm leaving bandwidth on the table. (This is a modest annoyance, but I mention it in case my ignorance not silicon is the limiting factor).
- It 'feels weird' to push every frame down a 1gbps link to the Control Bridge only to have it come right back up that same link. Maybe I misunderstand, and only frames destined for a different physical switch get pushed to the BC for processing? In which case they'd be traversing it anyway, no harm done
I'm still noodling on the 8.0.95 campus fabric guide, please feel free to point me to docs (or your own running examples!) if I missed anything.