--On February 26, 2006 7:53:40 AM -0600 Pete Templin <petelists@templin.org> wrote:
An argument could be made for individual VLANs to keep things like b- cast storms isolated. But I think the additional complexity will cause more problems than it will solve.
One must keep in mind that human error is the dominant cause of outages, and since there's not likely to be backhoes running around in a data center, IMHO the goal should be to remove as many ways as possible that your coworkers can muck things up.
Individual PTP links means a muckup probably affects only two devices. Switched LANs means a muckup possibly affects all devices (on one of the LANs), and not all of them may detect the problem at the same time.
pt
Except when you implement the PTP links as VLANs on switches, it means a muckup (to use your term) at the switch side can really muckup your PTP links in non-obvious and often hard-to-troubleshoot ways. There are tradeoffs either way. Personally, when interconnecting routers, I tend to prefer the PTP hard link and skip the switches. Sometimes that's not feasible. In those cases, generally, I prefer to go with rational groups of routers on VLAN segments rather than synthetic PTP links. However, each situation is different and the tradeoffs should be considered in light of the particular situation. Owen -- If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.