When is a router needed?

[Total]

How many players/computers until you need to start seperating into VLANs and a router would be needed? I'm talking about using powerful switches and a powerful router (Cisco).

I guess another way to word this question would be.... How many people can one VLAN handle?

 

[folken]

You would need to vlan if you ran out of IPs in your subnet. If you used a class A or B IP range you would need a big lanparty to use those up
Just as an example:
If you had a 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 network (class A) you could have 16777216 hosts. That would probably be sufficient for any lan party

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[Total]

Yep true.... I was more thinking, at what point do the TCP/IP broadcasts become to much overhead on the network before VLANs will need to be created to segrigate that network garbage?

I can't imagine that someone could host a 1000 person LAN using powerful switches and be able to have all the players and servers on a single subnet even if there where enough IP's to go around.... So how many players should a subnet *safely* support before you should create a second subnet, third, forth, ext?


Nice rig btw... <your sig link>

 

[folken]

Hm... I'm not sure on that. The largest lan I have delt with was somewhere between 300-400 machines at one site and on one subnet. I didn't notice any sort of overhead or network speed problems so I never pursued it.
I am curious to know though. Lemme do some googling and see if I can come up with anything

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[jihiggs]

subnets have nothing to do with what your asking. since everthing is being broadcast anyway what does it matter?

this is my boomstick!