This is exactly what we are recommending and building for our customers in that space. Most of the time the university network acts as a provider, so to me it only makes sense to use that type of tech. The biggest problem then is support, which could be something they are unwilling or unable to overcome.
On Oct 21, 2016, at 1:45 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
In a message written on Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 12:02:24PM -0500, Javier Solis wrote:
In a campus network the challenge becomes extending subnets across your core. You may have a college that started in one building with their own /24, but now have offices and labs in other buildings. They want to stay on the same network, but that's not feasible with the routed core setup without some other technology overlay. We end up not being able to extend the L2 like we did in the past and today we modify router ACL's to allow communications. If you already have hundreds of vlans spanned across the network, it's hard to get a campus to migrate to the routed core. I think this may be one of Marks challenge, correct me if I'm wrong please.
FWIW, if I had to solve the "college across buildings with common access control" problem I would create MPLS L3 VPN's, one subnet per building (where it is a VLAN inside of a building), with a "firewall in the cloud" somewhere to get between VLAN's with all of the policy in one place.
No risk of the L2 across buildings mess, including broadcast and multicast issues at L2. All tidy L3 routing. Can use a real firewall between L3 VPN instances to get real policy tools (AV, URL Filtering, Malware detection, etc) rather than router ACL's. Scales to huge sizes because it's all L3 based.
Combine with 802.1x port authentication and NAC, and in theory every L3 VPN could be in every building, with each port dynamically assigning the VLAN based on the user's login! Imagine never manually configuring them again. Write a script that makes all the colleges (20? 40? 60?) appear in every building all attached to their own MPLS VPN's, and then the NAC handles port assignment.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/