WAN Design Question

Hello everyone,

I’m kind of a noob, so please bare with me.

Let me give you a little background on the topology first.

We have our network core, which is located at our central office. We have 17 sites hang off of core. Each site has is on their own subnet and our network is flat.

Currently, each site has a server on the LAN to handle services like DHCP, DNS, and Authentication.

Here are our future plans, we are thinking of moving our connection to our ISP to another site and centralizing our servers at our central office to provide services (DHCP, DNS, Authentication) to all the sites on the WAN.

We would like to keep our servers at the central office and move the core to another site. Do you guys think this is a bad idea? I personally think the performance would be affected by having our core separated from the servers and configuration complexity goes way up.

Thanks in advance!!
Darren

Sounds like a text book question to me

Yes, bad idea. Critical services (i.e.: DNS, authentication, DHCP) would be severely impacted due to the delay over the WAN links. Not to mention that if the WAN links fail at any time, such services would be unavailable to the users.

We would like to keep our servers at the central office and move the core to another site. Do you guys think this is a bad idea? I personally think the performance would be affected by having our core separated from the servers and configuration complexity goes way up.

yup ur thinking is correct,, it'll affect d performance!

Yep. The right way to do it is to have server(s) at each location providing these critical services to the users in that place. Then have some sort of replication/synchronisation going on between them. Basic rule-of-thumb in network design; always minimize the amount of network the traffic needs to traverse