Router

[ITJake]

First of all I'd like to say. STH Patrick makes great videos!
Secondly, I need help finding a router that would fit our medium companies needs. We recently upgraded to SFP+ 10gig dealership wide. Our manufactures/vendors want their own respected networks.

We have fiber runs to each of our buildings (3), and we've seem to out grown our 1gig speeds. Our network is setup with a firewall at the main building, and two internet connection. We have several servers our other buildings need to access. This network has been so band aided before me, I want to do this right, and we are running out addresses... and fast. One of our vendors put a limitation that we stay in the /24 subnet. So we've been segregating everything out with Vlans. So we are deciding to put each building on their own network and own router.

Thankfully the person before me had 10gig rated fiber lines ran to each building.
That being said I'm looking for a router that can handle DHCP, a decent amount of throughput, it also needs to be able to interweave into our internal network, and most importantly it needs to have two sfp+ ports. Oh and be reasonably priced, I've looked at MikroTik and their products look great but they don't have a lot of throughput.

 

[coxhaus]

Why not use L3 switching at each building it will be faster than a router. If you want to lock out other networks you can using L3. Run your main firewall at your Dmark.

You might get away with 1 L3 switch depends on your requirements and the number of buildings or separate fiber connections.

 

[ITJake]

We have three buildings, All of which need their own DHCP servers, I have an L3 Switch in each building, But one of which doesn't have the capability

 

[BoredSysadmin]

I'd use IP helpers and a single site DHCP server with failover somewhere remote. Don't use the router's DHCP

 

[coxhaus]

My Cisco L3 small business switches all support multi-scoped DHCP servers. I would never use multiple routers as they don't have the bandwidth nor the speed of an L3 switch.

If you wanted to you could do it with 1 L3 switch and each building is InCharge of their DHCP scope on the 1 L3 switch. If you want to run multiple scopes to each building you could do that also using a trunk from the main L3 switch. Run the switches in each building as L2. But if you want you could run multiple L3 switches as there many ways to design this layout.

 

[kapone]

If you wanna do it right...I'd:

- Put an L3 switch in each building
- Put a core switch in one place that trunks the connections from all 3 buildings.
- Connect your dual WANs to that core switch.
- If possible, aggregate all your servers on the core switch.
- Build/Buy a decent router/firewall that can support VLANs and multi-scopes. If it can handle DHCP and DNS, fine, otherwise:
- Build/Buy a decent DHCP/DNS server.

Do it once, do it right, and forget about it.