I have two questions which I will separate to avoid confusion.
I intend to build a network based on redundancy. There will be two pieces of every device, sometimes more than 2 such as NIC cards. I drew up this picture for you.
As you can see I have two switches,one router and two servers. Each server will run Windows 2012 R2 Teaming,(Teams of 2),Each Team will be on its own VLAN (Please note this may change as the question 2 talks about it).
My first question is, what type of logic does the NICs have for load balancing? , Do I have to Stack the switches together for it to work? , Can I just connect two ports of the router to each of the switches and NOT stack them (the switches)? , Will this then send traffic from switch A to router to switch B? ,I would prefer them to be completely independent, so if a switch fails or a NIC fails won't be a problem.
My second question is about VLAN'ing. We have multiple independent processes running on the network (about 8). Where we would prefer that server A doesn't talk to server B if its not needed. This is making me create 8 different VLANs, and have each machine or VM have an IP address specifically on the VLAN. One or two computers need all 8. (There is a lot more than 2 servers, but for the picture sake, I only drew two for the example).
Is there a better way to do this? We are going to have the team VPN into the network, and I want them to be able to get to every switch/pc/vm, so I guess I would need another Administrator VLAN, adding another IP and another VNIC to each machine. There has to be a better way to do this.
Thank you all,