Home network sanity check - VLAN loops?

[Pakna]

Hello, I am trying to do a sanity check on this home network layout I intend to evolve to - in particular, I would appreciate some insight into:

• whether this network has any VLAN cycles
  • if it has, can I get away with just RSTP or do you recommend MSTP configuration?
• am I doing something wrong/forbidden with this approach? is something not going to work?

To give some additional details - the picture below gives just the trunks between the switches. The top two switches are located in the house rack, whereas the bottom three are located in two garage racks. The two trunk links between the core Dell 8024F and the Mikrotik CRS310 are two underground fibres. The Dell 8024F has a link to a firewall connected to the internet (not shown).

If it is necessary to delve deeper into reasons why this is setup like this, we certainly can discuss this but I feel like this should be a good starting level of details (just to keep the discussion focused).

The primary goal I'd like to accomplish here is to not have to setup any additional RSTP or MSTP settings - ideally, I'd just set the Core Switch to be the root bridge and the network should be good as there are no cycles that I can see and all packets should be able to reach all VLAN paths as described down below.

I might have the option to replace those Netgear units with alternative hardware - I could swap out at least one of these with N3024 and possibly the other. Should I consider that?

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[sko]

Why is that Dell switch called "core" if they are all daisy-chained?
I'd highly recommend using one (e.g. that Dell) as a real core and connect all other switches directly to it.
If e.g. that mikrotik thingy fails (or has one of the regular mikrotik-firmware-f*ckups) both netgears will go dark - STP is also pretty much useless in that configuration.

 

[Pakna]

Thanks for your reply - as you can see, I am no network engineer, just trying to get things working as simple as possible.
The switch is called "Core" because it's the one that hosts DHCP server and has the direct link to the firewall.

There is unfortunately no way to connect the other three directly to that "Core" switch - the pair of links between Dell 8024F and Mikrotik are underground links and it's just too complicated to run through additional links right now. I would love to do that but this is a hard limit as I don't feel like cutting down drywall and threading through another set of fibres. I shouldn't have been a cheapskate back when I was designing and should have just gone with something like an MTP-8 or MTP-12 cable underground and have proper fanouts at each exit point but it is what it is.

You're right that there is no redundancy and that is by design - this is a homelab setting and if that Mikrotik kicks the bucket, I'll just order a new one, be down for a few days and then re-apply the scripts that I have to get it back going.

I am actually not happy with being forced to go with Mikrotik but it's the only choice I could find with four 10G links. A Dell N1524p slipped by me by a width of hair and any other fibre switch with four to eight 10 G port count is really hard to find. An alternative would be to buy another Dell 8024F or Dell N4032 for about the same amount of money but the power consumption is then through the roof and I'd like to clamp down on it a bit. Blowing a 100 W for an extra pair of fibres makes me feel dumb - the Mikrotik has 10x less consumption and does the things that I need (which is 10G wire-speed inter-VLAN routing and pretty much nothing else). Could you recommend a better alternative?