My needs will be met by two patch panels with dedicated copper running between them for each port. But I'm looking at a few hundred ports and I'd rather not have to run a few hundred cables.
Unfortunately, VLANs are not an option (at least not in any configuration I'm aware of) so I am looking for some other means of trunking things together onto a single cable while ensuring they remain separate on either end. Maybe there is something similar to VLANs or maybe there is some way of wrapping one VLAN tag inside another? I'm hoping there's some sort of switch that will help me accomplish this.
Anyways, I'm looking for suggestions! I've attached my needs and constraints in both text and glorious MS Paint, below.
The Vehicles and Computers are physically separated.
- Vehicle A must have connectivity to Computer A. Vehicle B to Computer B, etc.
- There must be zero connectivity between different Vehicles. (There will be collisions and routing problems)
- There must be zero connectivity between different Computers. (Bad things will happen)
- Subnets and masks CANNOT be changed (artifact of vehicle equipment).
- The traffic between vehicles and computers will already have -multiple- VLAN taggings, and these VLANs will often (but not always) be the same between vehicles.
Edit: There will be multicast traffic between vehicles and computers. This traffic must not be shared with other vehicles/computers.
Edit2: The traffic between vehicles and computers is actually a mixture of VLAN-tagged and untagged traffic. i.e. a given link may contain packets for VLANs 1, 2, and 3, as well as untagged traffic.