I’m not sure where best to place is for this post, so I’ll start here
and see where I end up.
I’m the admin for a school system - elementary, middle, and high
schools, and well as the local board of education. Our current network
is broken into subnets, with each school residing in their own subnet.
We’re want to change the ip address scheme that we’re currently on, so
my helper has suggested that we drop the subnets and run everybody
through one subnet. His theory is ease of operation, with possibly some
performance gain, since not as many routers and switches would be
needed.
I still hold the idea that subnets give us an extra layer of protection,
since everyone would not be under one big broadcast domain.
If someone out there has any ideas, or suggestions, I would welcome the
input.
Thank you,
Jim
Just no way you should have less subnets than you currently have.
Perhaps more, but that would be a more in-depth question.
On 5/12/2014 12:06 PM, jfolmar01 wrote:[color=blue]
I’m not sure where best to place is for this post, so I’ll start here
and see where I end up.
I’m the admin for a school system - elementary, middle, and high
schools, and well as the local board of education. Our current network
is broken into subnets, with each school residing in their own subnet.
We’re want to change the ip address scheme that we’re currently on, so
my helper has suggested that we drop the subnets and run everybody
through one subnet. His theory is ease of operation, with possibly some
performance gain, since not as many routers and switches would be
needed.
I still hold the idea that subnets give us an extra layer of protection,
since everyone would not be under one big broadcast domain.
If someone out there has any ideas, or suggestions, I would welcome the
input.
Thank you,
Jim
[/color]
–
Craig Wilson - MCNE, MCSE, CCNA
Novell Technical Support Engineer
Novell does not officially monitor these forums.
Suggestions/Opinions/Statements made by me are solely my own.
These thoughts may not be shared by either Novell or any rational human.
[QUOTE=jfolmar01;21303]I still hold the idea that subnets give us an extra layer of protection,
since everyone would not be under one big broadcast domain.[/QUOTE]
while I can fully follow that statement, there may be conditions where slicing the network topology in a different fashion might be more appropriate.
Some questions you might have to ask yourself are
What level of isolation (of traffic) do you need? I.e., separate clients from servers, and/or separate students from teachers, and/or keep each organizational unit separate,… Will you have to control access across such boundaries, i.e. per packet filters and/or firewalls?
What is the typical traffic flow? Do you have applications that might run much easier if you have everything in a single network (think of multicast traffic - when contained in an isolated (sub-)network, you won’t need multicast routing)
What room for growth do you need (number of IP addresses required in a year)?
How’s your network hardware, feature-/power-wise? Will it support the ideal structure per the previous questions? (I.e. if you’d like to put the servers in a separate network, but have only slow separate routers, that would perform much worse than putting clients and servers in the same switch…)
I’m sure you’ll be much better of segmenting your network, rather than creating a single large IP subnet - but not for the reason of broadcasts alone.