Connect Branch office to Head office

[kiran kumar Chamakura]

Hi All,

We are coming up with an new branch office just to nearby our Main Office about 1 Km away. We need to connect this branch office using point to point connectivity. One of the Service providers is laying a dedicated fiber line between these offices. We are planning to connect using the Layer 3 switch at Head office and Branch office on a trunk mode on Gigabit interface.... DO you think is this the correct approach to connect the branch office..If you have any suggestion please help me.

[Vasileios Bouloukos MSc, ITIL, CCIE]

Hi Kiran,

I would recommend to connect your branch office to the Router of the Head Office than the Layer 2/3 switch ( i assume that the L2/3 switch is part of the distribution/aggregation layer of your topology).

So, when this branch office needs to communicate with an other branch office via the Head Office the traffic to be routed only by the router than to pass via the L3 switch to the HO router and then to a remote differnet Branch site.

Furthermore, it could be more easily to apply a common security policy if all the Branchs are connected to to the HO (Head Office) router. Finally, in respective of routing it will be easier to handle all the routes to your HO router only.

Hope that helps,

Vasilis