The plan of the network shows a layer 3 backbone being used to bridge the two buildings, which comprise of layer 2 networks running 802.1q VLANs. My idea of the network was to bridge the VLANs in Building A with the VLANs in Building B so as to have seamless internetworking between users of the same group (Students, Academic Staff, Registry, etc.)
Unfortunately, due to the equipment I have available to use in the networking lab rooms, I am struggling to find possible solutions to this issue. I have considered several tunneling protocols including Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol, GRE tunnels and VPN tunnels (configured as as a trunk.) However, as I am using Cisco Catalyst 3560 Multilayer Switches running IOS 12.2(50) to make up the Layer 3 backbone, does not support the command "xconnect" under any VLAN or FastEthernet interfaces and therefore will not allow L2TP tunneling.
GRE tunneling is another tunneling protocol that is available for use on Cisco ISR (Integrated Services Router), and is not recommended to end on Cisco Catalyst switches due to poor performance and network stability issues.
VPN tunnelling are an option due to being available on the Catalyst 3560 switches, however my issue with this is the added overhead to bridge the two buildings. As the backbone is entirely within the campus network, the overhead of a VPN connection between two almost distance-negligible devices may be too great. I have yet to test this on the real gear.
A few extra sources of information on tunnels available on Cisco equipment:
A few extra sources of information on tunnels available on Cisco equipment:
- Tunneling - GRE/L2TP
- add more later...
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