Router and Switch question
Question
Hello
I was wondering if anyone has experience with this.
Because currenting my servers are connected to one switch and that one switch is connection via a single Network cable towards the router.
Now what if I connect all the available ports on that router towards the switch, would it boost my transfer speeds and minimise the collisions of the packets?
Because if yes I would just buy one switch with 24 or 48 ports so I am manage it more neatly, if not I would just get 4 8-port switches and connect them individually to the router.
The most important thing is the transfer speed and collisions that I am experiencing on my local network via my 24port switch which is linked via a single line to my router We are planning to build our online catalogue on a dedicated server. A big quantity of images will be hosted and shared with many websites of our distributors. Efficiency and stability are the major issue. Budget isn't a problem. But we can't make our decisions which plan to pick up.
Answer
You shouldn't experience *any* collisions on an Ethernet switch. Each port gets its own full-duplex connection, and nothing gets broadcast to all ports except ARP queries and such. The whole point of a switch is to allow you to utilize nearly 100% of the full duplex bandwidth on every switch port.
If you connect multiple router interfaces to the switch, you'll need a unique IP for each router interface, and your downstream servers will still only send to the router IP they are configured for. What you might want is to setup a trunk so that multiple connections between the router interfaces and the switch are handled as a single aggregate connection. There are several ways to do this, and you would need to identify the method that both your router and switch can support.
That said, if you're nowhere near the capacity of a single connection (I'm assuming 100Mbps Fast Ethernet since this is switched), there is no benefit except redundancy, which is a tradeoff against tying up more ports and increasing complexity.
If you're outgrowing your switch by having too many servers, you need to cascade your switches; designate a central switch (or two, if you're using spanning tree properly) and attach other switches from there. If you attach each switch to the router, unless your router will behave as a switch also, you'll be segmenting your LAN, and segment-to-segment traffic will have to go through the router.
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