# 3 Managed Switches using STP

## Rooney

Hi All, 

This is off topic from Gentoo but i thought someone here might have some advise on what I'm trying to do.

I have 3 managed switches in my home one in the garage one in the office and one in the lounge, these are currently connected in a star shaped network with the garage being the center, i was thinking of connecting the office and lounge directly in addition to there connection to the garage to enable traffic to flow directly between these points without the need of passing the core switch in the garage to improve performance and create a redundant link. My understanding is all i need to do is enabled spanning-tree on all these switches to accomplish this?

Kind Regards, 

Rooney

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## Veldrin

Yes, you will need STP to avoid any loops. assuming, that you have a flat L2 network - i.e. not routing.

But STP (as the name suggests) creates a tree. Therefore your only gain will be redundancy, if one link goes down, and the fallback takes over. 

OTOH you could use link aggregation, and bundle multiple links together for improved performance. Downside, you'll need some additional cabling, and the are multiple (incompatible?) protocols. 

V.

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## Rooney

Thanks for the advise, I think I'll do link aggregation as I all ready have the additional cabling in place and I have my esxi server configured with multipul ports so I'm familiar with the Config , is it still worth enabling stp though?

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## Veldrin

does the esxi understand stp?

And even if it does, once a link goes down (without link aggregation), the node/interface is cut off.

I'd say, the STP starts making sense, once you have a full mesh of 4 switches.

You mentioned, that you wanted to improve performance. 

What is the current utilization? Which performance is bad? Could it be improved by prioritizing some protocol/services?

You never mention, what kind of hardware is used. What connection type are you using? (initial assumption would be 100Mbps copper).

V.

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## Rooney

the vswitch on esxi doesent have any option for stp, the network preformance is general good until i stream HD content which initially works fine until someone else starts using the network for other purposes such as copying large files or other streaming video/audio.

The hardware is a 3Com 24Gigabit Ports at the core and the office and lounge have a HP Procurve 12Port all ports are Gigabit so i think link aggreation from the core to each of the room giving each switch 2Gbit to the core would increase the performance

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## Veldrin

Depends on what kind of HD material that is. 

I am perfectly able to stream (through samba or nfs) HD material on a 100Mbps network. Therefore I guess the bottleneck is not the network, but rather the I/O of that server (assuming it is the same). 

The switches sound reasonable enough. Try to pull network statistics of the them via snmp and feed them into mrtg. this will give you a nice graph.

I am not sure, how something similar can be done for I/O of that server.

V.

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## Rooney

the service is normal samba ive also been looking in to enabling jumbo frames on the NAS and the two media centers to see if that will help

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## Veldrin

Go ahead.

I'm not gonna stop you, but if you ask for advise, I need as much information as possible, to base it one something.

The usual plan B is just to try it.

V.

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## Rooney

lol thanks for the advise, im going to have a go this weekend when the Wife is out so she doesent complain when it all stop working  :Smile: 

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