Five doctors have formed a partnership and are consulting my team and I for creating a network between the five offices. We will be using existing T1 lines to connect the offices but are not sure on the network and subnet design. Four of the offices are each about 15 miles from the central office, which has an existing LAN in place. Also, the east and west offices have existing LANs.
All five offices have outdated hardware and software, so we will be replacing all of the computers with new systems running Windows XP.
Each office will require ten computers, a printer/scanner/copier, and a fax machine.
We will be using SUSE Linux to run the server. It will also be using Samba in order to work with the XP clients.
We aren't sure which would be easier: if all of the offices should be on one subnet or if each office should have it's own subnet.
We also plan on having Voice Over IP for each office.
If it's all one subnet, then VoIP will be no problem.
But, if we go with multiple subnets, should we get seperate VoIP services for each subnet? or have one VoIP provider on the central server?
I should also mention that the doctors have not given us the job yet. They are "shopping around" for the best deal for them.
any help with this would be much appreciated.
2 comments… read them below or add one
I think your best move would be to offer both alternatives with regard to VoIP. You could get away with having one centralized server, but if the partnership ever changes - particularly if the partner where all the VoIP equipment is located ever leaves - then it will take some serious work to get things going again. If you put a server at each location it will cost more, but changes will be easier to implement. If you offer them both alternatives then you are doing two things: One, you're giving them a high and low priced alternative which will keep you competitive, and two, you're letting THEM take an active role in the design decision so they can't scream at you down the road if they make a bad decision.
As for the question of subnetting, I'm really not sure why this is an issue. Taking the 10.0.0.0/8 block, you could assign an entire /16 to one office and still have lots of room for growth. Even if you go with one VoIP server, it shouldn't have a problem routing between subnets.
You could also do both. Assign a 10.x.x.x subnet for each office for data and another, say 192.168.x.x (just to keep things very OBVIOUSLY separate) for the VoIP.
Don't forget to consider jitter. You'll definitely want to set up class of service.
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