I was going to stick to an SG300-52p for the JAP part regardless. Its going to be around 11x28.

The guy already has Sonos, and he loves it. I am doing Total Control for Control, so I ahve all the control over Sonos I need.

aahhh ok.. i thought you wanted to try and run JAP through the non JAP designed switches.

if you like the 52P why not just do a few of them for your entire network since you are family with them?

I hope that people read what you wrote and googled it. The difference between Layer 3 vs Layer 2 in this case is huge. Networking is not a strong point for most integrators and with the way everything is headed we need to get stronger. I've been working on my networking, even did a week long Palo Alto firewall class, and it's helping a TON!!

I want to be able to turn POE ports off, check on certain devices etc. I am now looking at pakedge, since the araknis is only a L2 switch.

Check out the Ubiquiti Edge switch - it will do all that + more... all ports are POE, just buy the one your need based on your power budget 250/500 or 750 on the 48 port. Very powerful, a good value imho, but very little support.

A L2 switch like the araknis can still do all the vlan tagging, participation, per port POE rebooting, etc.... it may do what you need depending on the router and its abilities. I am just not very familiar with the ERL to be of much help. BTW - we use the arakins with ihiji and they work great.

Also - You may want to consider L2 or even dumb switches after a router that you can configure the interfaces with different networks and VLANs. We do this with Mikrotiks. To a large extent it simplifies the configuration pitfalls - simple is usually better. We have had good success with the Prosafe stuff behind the routers as an example. The challenge is large PoE switches will be at least "smart" and require some configuration.

The Araknis would have no problem in this design either the you could have per port power from OvrC, visibility, stats, etc... I am just not very familiar with the ERL to be of much help. I would be surprised if you couldn't partition the ERL interfaces by network, DHCP, VLAN, etc.... but again this is just a guess.

Hope this helps - either way if you want L3 check out the Edge switches.

Depending on your topology, you should not need multiple L3 switches. In most cases you only need one L3 switch to handle InterVLAN routing.

Devices will send any traffic destined for a network outside their own to the default gateway - usually .1. The traffic will traverse the L2 VLAN until it gets to the gateway. Multiple L3 switches would need to be configured with different routable addresses (SVIs, switch virtual interfaces). You can only have one gateway on your clients. All InterVLAN routing is going to end up on one L3 switch even if you have multiple L3 switches. The topology with a L3 switch usually looks like this:



In this example you have 4 total VLANs (200.1.1.0/24 is a VLAN, just assume its VLAN1). Any traffic originating in the L2 switched network destined for another VLAN is going to traverse L2 to find the gateway (.1 of the devices VLAN), which is the L3 switch. The L3 switch maintains a routing table with all the connected VLAN networks and will route the traffic. If the traffic is destined for a network other than those VLANs known to the switch, the L3 switch will send it to the gateway of last resort. This particular example has a static route for the gateway of last resort pointing at 200.1.1.2. This routes the traffic from the L3 switch to the router and off to the interwebs.

For example, VLAN2 PC pings VLAN3 PC. The packet will go from VLAN2 PC to a L2 switch then up to the L3 switch. Routing happens, then back to a L2 switch and then down to VLAN3 PC. It would do the same even if you had multiple L3 switches because you can't have multiple L3 switches routing on the same subnet.

Are you putting all these switches in the same closet or are they going to different areas?

Same closet.

If you are worried about backplane bandwidth, a stacking switch will provide the most throughput. The Cisco SG500 is stackable and you end up with basically one large switch with a 1 or 10 Gig inter-switch backplane. (I only have experience with Cisco's enterprise equipment so I don't know how difficult the SG500 is to setup).

If you are not worried about backplane, you can use a combination of switches.

• Use an SG300 as a master L3 switch. This switch basically functions as the distribution switch for the other switches. You can select the port density based on what is happening downstream. Assume 2 ports per downstream switch (use link aggregation to increase throughput).
• I am not familiar with JAP's best practices but I assume they recommend isolating the video switching infrastructure. Use a single SG300-52p in L2 mode for JAP.
• Use whatever switches for the remaining density. Assume two ports for uplink (again, in a link aggregation).

JAP is L3 mode if you are using JAD Config and their drivers. JAP is only L2 mode if you are using the BlackWire drivers

Something like this may work:



Such a setup would require static routes on the L3 distribution switch and the JAP switch.

These are assumptions as I'm not familiar with what JAP does with auto configuration.

Or you could use the JAP switch as the distribution switch.

I will be using JAD Config, so my Sg300-52p for my JAP system will be config'd as a Layer 3 switch with a static route in my Edge Router.

I am assuming here again, but the only traffic coming from the JAP switch would be control protocols so bandwidth needs would be minimal. You could use the JAP SG300 as the distribution switch, as well. But that may violate best practices and could potentially impact the video network.



If you want to implement a Cisco L3 switch with Araknis, you could use a single SG300-10 or SG300-20 or SG300-28. L3 switches are generally faster than routers at routing - especially with consumer or prosumer class routers. However, it really depends on what you are doing. If you are routing very little data between VLANs, then it makes little difference whether you use a L3 or L2 switch. If most of the traffic is egressing to the internet, it is going to hit the router anyway and the L3 switch is mostly unnecessary.

If you chose not to use a L3 switch, I would still recommend connecting down stream switches to a single distribution switch. If you cascade then you create a bottle neck that increases as you move closer to the router.