Switch Bandwidth – Managing Bandwidth on a Switch

Not all together happy with how this post turned out, but I've learned things that I didn't know before, so that's good.

For example, normally if two nodes (A and B) are connected to a switch which is on the downstream side of another device like your firewall, the switch will route packets from A -> B and vise versa without contacting anything upstream (from @Tedwin).

I decided to post my own answer with the good parts from the comments with @Panther Modern.

• Use higher quality hardware. Since I'm using Netgear ProSafe unmanaged switches, I'm considering upgrading to something like Cisco. @Mike Pennington suggested the SG300 series, which I have researched before and found on Amazon for less than $200. @Panther Modern suggests Arista, Cisco, Juniper and Brocade switches.

• Troubleshoot each piece independently and isolate the problem. I've done some of this, to the extent that I have isolated the general path, but in an environment where 100% uptime makes people happy and allows them to get work done, this can be tricky. But point taken...

• Consider topology and where you have access to and how many users you have. These factors can influence your choices for gear and how you go about answering your questions.

• Find good networking tools and use those to help troubleshoot your issue. pfSense helped a lot concerning traffic that passed through the firewall. I also learned about Robocopy for limiting traffic on the client. This tool works pretty well.

Layer-2 devices like switches an WAPs get IP addresses for management. There are unmanaged switches which don't get, and don't have an option for, IP addresses because they don't need them since they are not managed. Some WAPs (LWAPs) don't get configured with IP address as you normally would, but they get an IP address from DHCP and a configuration from a WLC.

You could give these devices IP addresses not on the same network as the network which they serve. This could be a problem since you may not be able to get to the devices to manage them, or it may be that you have set up a management VLAN with which to get to them.

Edit:

The IP addresses assigned to these devices are not wasted addresses. The devices need to be managed. As I wrote above, you could have a separate management VLAN. If you have so few addresses per subnet, you are really doing it wrong. Each subnet will have a bunch of unused addresses. These addresses could be considered wasted, but it is how IP addresses get assigned. There has been a lot of research and math to demonstrate how you can't, and really shouldn't, have a very efficient IP address scheme. This is one of the reasons IPv6 was designed the way it is with over 18 quintillion addresses per subnet.