Let's Refresh This Infrastructure then!

Ok, so it's been rather a busy week and it's finally done and dusted.

The decision was made to move from our current IP structure which saw every machine and server sitting on the same subnet and creating rather a lot of broadcast traffic all over the building unnecessarily. This in turn accentuated the lack of intelligent routing in place throughout the entire infrastructure and was cause for some serious change.

Each wing has been assigned its own switch and VLAN which in reality splits it off into a subnet which in turn is routed properly by the core switches in the server room. The new servers will be assigned a VLAN in much the same way and legacy equipment (just servers now) on the old IP range is routed properly through the core switch aswell, until it is phased out completely.

Static routes were then applied to each of our internet connections, giving full access to both from the new routed network. One 2Mbit fiber feed from one provider and one 8Mbit ADSL feed from a different provider. One or both of these will shortly be replaced by a 10Mbit feed from a new different provider to move inline with our refresh and enable better throughput for external client access and internal internet access. This is another sub-project which will tie in nicely with the replacement of the firewall and client-access gateway moving forward.

First we had to devise when to rip out all of the old kit and replace it with the new kit giving no downtime at all to users. One wing per night was decided after everybody had gone home, starting with the IT Department on the ground floor and the IT Training Room on the top floor (which uses a just a few sockets in its own wing). This way any errors would be insignificant and all the production users would not be affected.

All went swimmingly and each machine started up with a new IP from the VLAN range set on the respectuve wings. Routing to the servers (and other machines in different wings) worked perfectly from the new IP range and vice versa. Success!

Below are some photos of the Data Rooms dotted about the building and the new Hewlett Packard equipment now installed in them.

You will notice that the old Netgear switches are still installed in the racks with cables plugged in. These are the printers' connections until we change the IP addresses, they will remain there and then be migrated onto the new switches.