Somewhat advanced network question for new home

[fiberonsale]

Hi -

The company I work for normally does networks for luxury homes and we always do it with and "industrial strength" kind of design, at a minimum using decent hardware.

However the current project is new territory, just because it's large and has a lot of devices.

There are multiple buildings involved (switches connecting via fiber).

There are 6 VLANs including separate ones for voice (>30 IP phones/intercoms), cameras (>20 1080p IP cameras), control system, guest, etc.

The general design includes 6 Cisco SG200 switches of various sizes all connecting to a SG300 switch acting as the "main" switch which will route between VLANs. The SG300 switch would also connect to the router, a Cisco RV320. Since this network will have a lot of internal traffic, having the layer three switch should keep most of it out of the router. An important point is that the SG300 switch is the only connection point between all the SG200 switches.

So here are my questions:

(1) Is it proper to connect the switches together? If the layer 3 switch goes down, then there will be no traffic between the switches. It seems like if I set up STP correctly then I could connect all the switches together but the ports would be shut down by STP as long as the root bridge (SG300) was up. As soon as that went down, STP would stop blocking the ports connecting the switches. There would be no communication between VLANs, but at least the cameras could all keep recording.

(2) Similar question, should the switches connect to the router in addition to the layer 3 switch? My rationale is that traffic destined for the internet is going to be heading for the router anyway, so why send it through another switch first?

I realize that with the amount of traffic involved I could probably be a lot less careful and it would still work fine, but I would really like to design it properly.

THANKS!

[thecommis]

This is very challenging setup. In home connection like this it is better to have multiple internet routers. No need to consider true layer 3 at home unless your voip phones are getting DHCP and intercom from internal setup.

In case of internet router failure your devices can connect using other internet.

In case you want to use layer 3, use dual layer 3 switches in active-passive or active-active mode. STP should not be concern. any failure will be handled seamlessly by backup Layer 3.