[SOLVED] Switch Between Cable Modem & Router WAN Port

[dangalore1988]

Hello Everyone,

Bit of a confusing one and I'm after some guidance.

I'm on VM Gig 1 Fibre and have a VM Hub 4. They are due to replace the Hub 4 with a Hub 5 which supports 2.5gbps on one LAN Port.

I use the Hub in Modem Mode so that port is connected directly to a NETGEAR MK83 Router which is the DHCP server for my network. A LAN port from the Router goes into a 10/100/1000Mbps switch which is a smart managed Netgear switch suppporting VLANs and all devices connect to that switch at gigabit speeds.

I have realised that the MK83 Router only has gigabit ports on the WAN and LAN, meaning that my internet speed is always going to be constrained by the gigabit limitations so roughly 950Mbps max even after VM upgrade the Hub 4 to a Hub 5.

I had already planned to buy a 10 Gigabit Switch and I am purchasing a NETGEAR smart managed 8 Port switch again supporting VLANs.

I want to do the following:

• Ethernet port from Hub 4/5 Modem into the 10 Gigabit switch
• SFP from the 10 Gigabit Switch to the Gigabit Switch
• Ethernet port from the Gigabit Switch to the Router's WAN Port

I've seen the following image on another forum which seems to reflect what I'm trying to do:

I've not used VLANs before so I don't really understand this properly, but if I was to setup following the above:

• Can computers on the left side, communicate with computers on the right?
• Will all computers on the Network still get their IP Addresses from the Router as DHCP server (all other DHCP servers such as the Modem are disabled)
• Will the Router still receive the external IP address from the ISP?
• Will all devices on the left segment be able to communicate at 10 Gigabit speed between themselves? My plan is to plug the 10 gig capable devices into the left segment and the non-10 gig devices into the right. In practice these switches are in a rackmount case side by side - I'd use a SFP cable to connect between the switches as they both support this.

Apologies if this seems really obvious to some out there but I'm not used to this setup!

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

I think the answer is yes to all your questions.

Take the diagram and redraw it as 2 switches on both ends instead of 2 vlans. Everything will perform exactly as if you had 2 actual switches on each end....other than having to share bandwidth on the single cable rather than 2 cables.

The very tricky part is to make sure you have the the vlan tags correct on the ports between the 2 switches.