Hello,

Our data centre provider operates 2 sites, and we currently have equipment in one and would like to have equipment in the second. They've told me that they operate a layer 2 vlan between the 2 sites over a 20gbit connection, and that they'd just give me ethernet cable at each end to connect the locations.

At the current site, we have Cisco 2960 48TC-L switches, all the machines are on a 192.168.x.x subnet and we have cisco firewalls with which we connect to our internet provider with.

My question is what would I need to do to connect the 2 sites? could I just plug the ethernet cables the provide into the cisco switches, and have the same switches the other end? would I need to set up a separate internal network on the other side and connect both through the firewalls? Would the cisco switches need special configuration?

We expect to maintain a number of connections between the 2 sites, and each site would have its own internal dns name like dc1.xx.com.

Sorry if I'm being vague or haven't included enough information, I've a fairly good knowledge of hardware but we're down a netops guy at the moment and I'd like to get both sites on-line ASAP!

Thanks in advance!