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I have a two Sonicwall NSA250Ms where one of them is a "high availability" device.

The sonicwall engineer suggested that I should connect both my WAN and LAN to both of these devices.

Naturally, I could use 2 network switches; 1 to connect the WANs together, and 1 to connect the LANs together.

However, I am a bit limited in my rack space, and it would be very beneficial if I could just use ONE network switch (with a minimum of 6 ports of course) and somehow split the 6 ports in half. In other words, I need a device that will act as 2 seperate switches in one.

I think I could just connect all these together on any switch, since the Layer 3 communication intended for WAN will just get ignored by the LAN and vice-versa, but I am not sure if this will cause me trouble in the long run.

I also think I could configure a more proper router to act as a switch and designate the ports as different zones/networks. However, I think this may be overkill.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions for devices that could handle this effectively while still being under a couple hundred dollars.

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  • Just a point, if you have HA license, both of them are in High Availability. I mean, they should talk each other through a HA link and form the HA cluster. Maybe this question can help you networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6903/…
    – KorXo
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 7:59
  • Thanks for the input. I am aware that the devices should be connected via this link, but my understanding is that both devices STILL need to each be connected to the LAN and WAN in some fashion. Consider the case that one of these loses power or just dies entirely, how can the other unit have access to the WAN or LAN through the dead device. I imagine the HA link between them is there just so they can check up on each other and fail over when one goes awol. In any case, I think Jim G. may have answered my question. I am going to do some testing with a managed switch and then mark the answer.
    – LittleTreeX
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 14:24
  • Right. KorXo, LittleTreeX is referring to how to hook the actual network ports up to the LAN and WAN. The HA port should always be a direct link between the two devices - no switches in between.
    – Jim G.
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 14:35

1 Answer 1

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If you have a managed switch that supports VLANs, just separate the WAN and LAN ports onto separate VLANs and you're good. I would not recommend using one switch with all traffic on the same L2 broadcast domain - it causes multiple headaches, the most basic will be the sonicwall will report a bunch of spoofed traffic.

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  • It seems so basic, but my experience with managed switches has been little. I'm going to test this out, and then mark your answer. I assume that the VLAN will basically act as I have described in that it will segregate the traffic based on how I set up the ports. Example: ports 1 - 3 are on one VLAN and cannot see or communicate with ports 4 - 6 which will be on another VLAN. Thanks again for the guidance.
    – LittleTreeX
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 14:29
  • That's correct. You can get a web-based "smart switch" from almost all the common networking vendors that supports VLAN tagging for a couple hundred dollars. You're basically splitting up the physical switch in to multiple broadcast domains.
    – Jim G.
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 14:36

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