We're in the middle of deploying a large-ish (40k access ports) new network on a hospital. To avoid problems with large broadcast domains and large STP domains we have split the physical network into a number of separate sections with no L2 contact between them. Termination is on Cat65 Sup2T using subinterfaces on 10G ports in 6904 cards. We're using HP 7500 for aggregating Nexans microswitches (4 downlink GE ports, two uplink SFP ports) and a pair of HP 7510s together with 480-960 Nexans switches make up one STP domain. (Broadcast domains are further reduced in size via different VLANs.)
For some time we have been in a (not so constructive) dialogue with certain vendors of medical equipment. Many of these are not accustomed to actually routing things and rely heavily on direct L2 contact between the individual devices. Some of these utilise multicast, but they are not willing to have it routed. Internally we have discussed wether it's possible to construct some kind of "overlay" network that provides L2 services across an IP network. It would need to be multipoint, and we're possibly talking > 100 ports for some of these L2 domains. How could one accomplish this? The perfect solution would be something utilising multicast for discovery of member nodes and some kind of multipoint dynamic mesh tunnelling with MAC learning and whatever else is needed for providing L2 services. But either my google-fu is weak or nothing like this exists. I've been thinking of a hub-and-spoke solution using L2TPv3 but I have difficulties imagining a hub design that actually scales to maybe dozens of L2 domains each with possibly more than 100 spokes. Does anything like this exist? It doesn't have to be Cisco, that's just what we know best. Any other suggestions are very welcome. Thanks in advance! (PS: It has to be pure IP as seen from the rest of the network, so no MPLS unless it's something like MPLSoGRE.) (PPS: Bonus points for spoke/mesh member equipment with only passive cooling, so it can be placed together with the "client" devices.) -- Peter _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
