Site to Site VPN – How to Ping from ASA

Best practice wise - should I let the router or the ASA handle NAT (Overloading)?

In the most general of design best practices NAT is performed between an inside and outside network. NAT overloading is generally performed at the edge when there is limited public IP address space. You can learn more about NAT overloading, also known as Port Address Translation or PAT, in RFC 2663 (PAT is referred to as Network Address Port Translation (NAPT) in section 4.1.2).

In this particular scenario you can argue that you have two inside and outside networks and will need to perform some form of NAT on both the ASA (whether that is the NAT overloading you're using now, NAT exemption, static NAT, etc) and the Cisco Router.

I can ping the 172.16.2.2 interface but not 172.16.2.1 from a pc connected to one of the layer 2 switches (proves intervlan routing is working -- i have a 172.20.100.8 address on the PC). Why can't I ping 172.16.2.1 from a PC but I can from the Layer 3 Switch?

The ASA 172.16.2.2 is receiving the ICMP echo-request but does not have a route back to 172.20.100.0/27. The echo-reply is actually being forwarded to the Router 172.16.1.1 via the default route.

And most of all -- Why can't I get out to the Internet from the Layer 3 switch?

Currently your ASA and Cisco Router do not have routes to internal devices other than their connected routes.

Your ASA configuration:

route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 172.16.1.1 1

This will provide a default route via the outside interface, but how will the ASA know how to reach subnets residing behind the Layer 3 Distribution Switch?

You'll need to add routes to the internal subnets via the inside interface using the Layer 3 Distribution Switch as the next-hop IP address.

ASA static routing example:

route inside 172.19.12.0 255.255.255.240 172.16.2.2
route inside 172.19.3.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.2.2
route inside 172.20.100.0 255.255.255.224 172.16.2.2

Further reading: ASA static routing

Your Cisco Router's configuration:

ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 200.200.200.200

Additionally, how will your border router know how to reach subnets other than it's connected routes, and the catch all default route via the outside interface's next-hop address 200.200.200.200?

Router static routing example:

ip route 172.19.12.0 255.255.255.240 172.16.1.10
ip route 172.19.3.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.1.10
ip route 172.19.100.0 255.255.255.224 172.16.1.10
ip route 172.16.2.0 255.255.255.224 172.16.1.10

Further reading: ISR static routing

I cannot get an ip address right now from the DHCP server (Windows). Any insight into why?

Ensure you have end-to-end IP reachability between the client(s) sending DHCP discover messages and the DHCP server.

From what I can gather from your topology and configuration, the subnets 172.19.3.0/24, 172.19.12.0/28 and 172.20.100.0/27 should have no issues connecting to each other (assuming they are configured to use their respective default gateways) from a networking perspective.

You can remove the ip helper-address syntax from the SVI 100 given that the DHCP server is on the same segment and that command is used for a DHCP server(s) that is on a different segment.

interface Vlan100
ip address 172.20.100.1 255.255.255.224
ip helper-address 172.20.100.27

The problem you are seeing is normal behavior. When you use object groups to define the tunnel traffic, the ACL gets expanded to a regular ACL with multiple entries. For example, this ACL

access-list outside_cryptomap extended permit ip 192.168.11.0 255.255.255.0 object-group DM_INLINE_NETWORK_1  

becomes

access-list outside_cryptomap extended permit ip 192.168.11.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0
access-list outside_cryptomap extended permit ip 192.168.11.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.50.0 255.255.255.0

Each line in the ACL creates a Securty Association (SA) for the VPN.

Because you are using dynamic VPNs, the SA doesn’t get created until the remote router sees traffic that matches the ACL entry. You apparently have devices on the 192.168.0.0 network that are talking to the 192.168.11.0 network, and this creates the SA for that entry.

But you don’t have any devices on the 192.168.50.0 network talking to 192.168.11.0, so the SA never gets built. With no SA, you can’t send traffic from 192.168.11.0 to 192.168.50 0. Once you ping from 192.168.50.0 to 192.168.11.0, the SA is created and you can send traffic in either direction.

To make this work the way you want, you have three choices:

1. Go back to static VPNs. The SAs are always up.
2. Find some way to generate traffic on the 192.168.50.0 network. Anything will do.
3. Readdress your networks so that you have one ACL entry that covers both networks at the remote end. You will have only one SA, which will be created as soon as traffic flows.