Question for Routing/Switching Gurus

[pw40b]

As a techie business owner, I am dangerous enough to know certain magic words, but apparently not necessarily smart enough to figure this out, so I am looking for some ideas.

Our business does systems work for clients, that necessitates that we build their racks in our shop and make sure everything is working before we deliver them to the client site.

For any given client project, we like to have the main "processor" at x.x.x.200, and the WAPs at x.x.x.70, etc. We have a pretty good standard so that whenever we are onsite it's not a surprise to find out where certain network devices are.

The difficulty is that at any given time, we may be working on up to 4-5 different client projects in the shop. And we need to be able to log into each of them through the network, and each needs to be able to access the internet.

So, in a nutshell, at any given time we have the following segments in which I would like to keep network traffic separate:

1. Client network 1
2. Client network 2
3. Client network 3
4. Client network 4
5. Client network 5
6. Company main data network
7. Company VOIP network.
8. Guest wireless access

My hunch is that I need to implement vlans on some Cisco 2960-type (we are a Cisco reseller) switches, but I don't really understand the capabilities of subnets or if that would help us out (again, my hunch is, no because we would end up changing all the IP addresses when it comes time to install at client site.)

Thanks all,
PW

 

[thiggins]

VLANs work on Layer 2 by blocking broadcast traffic. IP addresses are Layer 3.

VLANs would work fine if you keep all the "networks" on the same subnet. Once you have multiple subnets, you need to route traffic between them. You could do it with static routes, but a router that can handle multiple subnets would be easier.