I know there are a bunch in here involved in IT so i'm looking for advice. I'm mostly self taught in networking and I know enough to be dangerous at my job. I can ping, know what ARP is, etc. I have ZERO certifications nor desire for any of that. With that said, I'm looking into learning about VLANs as we have a couple customers running them and I believe they are causing issues with our systems.
For the inevitable "What is your system" question:
http://www2.emersonprocess.com/en-us/brands/csitechnologies/cppm/csi6500/pages/csi6500machineryhealthmonitor.aspx
I basically give it a static IP per "rack", the server has a static IP and they all communicate. You access the server to do pretty much anything and the server sends commands to the racks. This entire setup is on it's own VLAN and they use a tunnel to allow people onsite on a different VLAN to access the system. The problem is, the system seems to stop responding from their other VLAN sporadically but locally the system is alive and 100% operational. This tells me that the tunnel from one VLAN to the other isn't working right but they insist "it's fine". Furthermore, this happens most from ~7am till about ~5pm which says their network traffic from people being in the office is cluttering it up or something.
What I want to do is use one of our systems and set up a VLAN similar to theirs at my house so I can mimic what they are doing. What I need are some good guides or tutorials I can read on VLANs and how to tunnel traffic between them to specific IPs.