The lab has expanded somewhat. I now have two layer 3 switches, one with POE for Asterisk work and a new HP 48 port. I also have some loaner firewalls to play with Juniper NS5-GT. I've got VTP going over the cisco switches for vlan management, the HP doesn't talk VTP unfortunately. All of the uplinks, other than to the dumb gig switch are dot1q trunks which carry the vlans between switches.

The Junipers will be serving DHCP and either NATting or Routing for a few vlans which will sit behind the ESXi hosts, more as a learning tool rather than doing anything useful.

I am now hunting down some mini-GBICs for the HP so that I can link the POE switch at gigabit speeds.

Next on the agenda 3 x cisco routers and all the serial crap to go with them.