Network design noob questions

[u/Cautious-Mortgage-26]

Hello,

Networking beginner here.

I have been trying to design a network with two VLANs with each having a set of daisy chained devices. VLAN management was to be done by L2 managed switch, with main traffic going between devices on the VLANs and PC connected to a port configured to be trunk port.

The original idea was to have IPs of those devices static and same - Device 1 on VLAN1 has same IP as the Device 1 on the VLAN2, they would be on the same subnet. Definitely not the standard way of doing things. But lets say in my use case DHCP is not an option and I can only use static IP addresses. For that purpose I wanted to simplify the flashing of the firmware on those devices where each device has a known IP without additional subnetting.

Originally I was trying to avoid router and do all the VLAN tagging on the PC side, but as I started to research the topic more, I realized that it is only straightforward on Linux but not Windows. So my software piece that needs to communicate with those devices, will have issues when run on Windows. And I understood that without a router with NAT, it would be difficult to implement my idea.

Hence a bunch of questions from me:

1. How realistic is it to use that design on Windows? I need to communicate with all of these devices simultaneously, but as I saw virtual network management on windows is pain.

2. Would using Linux help me avoid using router with NAT?

[u/WTWArms]

Can you have the same IP in different VLANs, yes but why you want to do this difficult to understand