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.
Best Answer
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.