Setting Up a New Network, reviewing the gear

Check out the video, its not the best quality because I used my Blackberry Bold to record it. But at least you get to see the gear being used to setup a new network. You get to see the Cisco ASA 5505, which is awesome. These Security appliances, are great for there small footprint. They are really designed for a small to medium branch office network. It has many of the features that the Cisco 5510 or 5520 have, just smaller and more compact.

Also in this network we are using cisco 3750 stackwise switches for the core/distro layer. For those that don't know, Cisco design model includes Access layer, distro and core layer.

The access is where you typically have the users connect to, or the closet switches. The Distribution layer is where we configure network policies, and restrictions. The core should be the fastest part of the network. It typically is the backbone. In this network the 3750 is combo core/distro and our access layer will be Cisco 3560 with POE or power over ethernet. This means when we plug in an access point or phone that requires power. The device is powered up just by plugging into a POE port. Very kewl!!!

The best part of the video is understanding how kewl the Cisco 3750 switches are. In real world these switches allow us to start small and grow slowly, or scale as needed.

Review of Real World:
- 3750 use stackwise cables as the backplane so that the entire stack is managed as a single switch. Very cool, configure master and then the rest act as part of one large switch.
- Always power up the switch you want to be the master first. Then check the led to show that the switch is in fact elected as master.
- Once the master is elected, then power on the rest of the switches on the stack.
- Its probably a good idea to configure the master priority so that the switch you want master always boots up as master. I will put the config for this in the next post.
- The best thing about this stack wise is that you can add switches to the stack when you need more ports.

The bad news about Master election:
- If you use auto election, then if you power off the stack and boot up switches in different order, you will find that the switch orginally configured as master will likely not be the master. This will affect how the ports show when you run the "sho int status" command. What used to be gi1/0/1 will not be the same if the master changes. Solution to this is hardcode the master in the config.
- The other bad news, is make sure when you add a switch the stack, that the switch code is the same as the other switches in the stack, if not the newer code switch will want to become the master. This in turn can cause all kinds of problems in a production environment.
- simple rules, use same switch series 3750, same code or make sure they are all up to latest code before implementing new switch. Make sure that you hardcode a master to avoid issues upon unexpected reboots or power outages. (Although they should be on UPS, stuff always happens).