What is the best network topology for audio?

[egeerdes]

Greetings everyone,

My name is Ethan and I am slightly new to routing and switching in the broadcast industry. I want to make my network fault tolerant but optimized for audio transmission. In my research, I am pretty sure I need to remove all loops, disable RSTP, and I think link aggregation should be implemented but, am not confident on the actual implementation. Would I just link aggregate to the next switch, like a bus topology? I found some switch stacking cables and I am thinking of possibly using those as well. My network is meraki based, I have 4 main switches, and 1 inside a studio. I also have 2 of the mx250's and want to integrate them both for high availability. Any guidance / experience sharing would be awesome. Thank you.

[alemabrahao]

There is some documentation that will help you.

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Recommended_Topologies/MX_and_MS_B...

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/...

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/...

https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Tools_and_Troubleshooting/VoIP_on_Cisco_Mera...

[egeerdes]

lots to chew on. Thank you.

[cmr]

What switch models do you have, how many locations do they live in and is your traffic mainly in the site or mostly to outside servers etc.?

[PhilipDAth]

Hopefully the 3 main switches are stackable.  Simply stack them,  RSTP won't cause any issues if the network is loop free, so I wouldn't worry about touching that.

Use a pair of cables to the fourth switch, and combine them into a channel using LACP.

Ports that go to devices should be configured as access ports.  Ports between switches should be configured as trunk ports.

I would tend to connect each MX250 to a different single switch (one MX to one MS, and the other MX to a different MS), to maintain everything loop free.