I manage IT for the factory side of our businesses, and manage/connect everything to our datacenter, including PLCs and discrete components. Rockwell offers Cisco Stratix switches at a ridiculously expensive price in exchange for the capacity to assign specific IP addresses to specific ports (not mac addresses, ports) on the switch. The rationale is that maintenance techs could replace factory components at any time of the day, and simply plugging the replacement asset into the same ethernet connection assigns the asset the same IP address as the one that was removed, ensuring continuity without IT involvement. At 3AM, this is a nice feature from my perspective, and beats having to either change a static mac DHCP entry, or assigning an IP manually to the asset in the wee hours of the morning.
So... was thinking about how to emulate this on the N2XXX switches that we have throughout the facility.
- Could we create a VLAN for each port on the switch, and create DHCP assignments for each of those VLANS, with an address reservation of 1 IP address available per VLAN?
- Any other ideas of how to achieve the same thing as the Stratix switches?
Thanks in advance for your input.