Hi - im looking at using fibre for long runs to FOH and im investigating this idea:
Using a switch at FOH and another at Stage connected by 2 Fibre channels and LAG for redundancy.
Seperate VPN’s for: Control, Dante (recording, waves rack, ULXD and FOH amps), Dsnake and Surface expansion slot’s.
I have read that a layer 3 switch is not recommended for DSNAKE however would it be ok if they are on their own VPN?
QoS scheduling is imperative for Dante so im wondering if this will play havoc with the DSNAKE?
Is the best option just to try it an see?
Regards
Ben
Why not using 4 fibre’s
2 for DSNAKE 2 for the rest
simply with media converters and unmanaged switches
Because there is a control network and a Dante network that need VLAN’s so wifi can be used for control and not be flooded with potential multicast information from Dante sends.
There would also be no redundancy for the long fibre run’s in that set up.
I have media converters for a simplified setup for less vital situations like you suggest.
Also if i want to fully expand the GLD using AR2412 - AB168 and AR84 i would another 2 channels of fibre to make use of the surface expansion slot.
Hi Ana,
I know of customers who successfully routed dSNAKE through a managed switch as you suggest, but I don’t have full reports of their settings or hardware I’m afraid. I’ve also heard of others spending days troubleshooting clicks and glitches, hence our recommendation to proceed at your own risk 
The dSNAKE VLANs must be set to 100Mbps and dedicated to one connection each. On these VLANs, turn off any protocol (such as spanning tree, broadcast storm protection etc) and avoid VLAN tagging to prevent conflicts / extra packets from interfering with the audio stream.
Hope this helps.
Thanks Nicola for that.
If there is any chance you could put me in touch with those that have had this working that would be great.