Is it better to use the 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x address range for a small business network?

Solution 1:

RFC 1918 may offer you some guidance on this. At the end of it all though, you've got to design your network to suit, well, your network. If you've only got ~50 devices on the network, then any /24 (255.255.255.0 netmask) will more then suffice

What do you estimate your growth to be? Will a /24 suit in the future? That's a consideration you need to take into account

The performance side of things, I'd probably leave any performance impact to be theoretical. And management, well, that may depend on the tool used. Are you just considering IP allocation. Will DHCP work for you? Do you plan on having statically configured devices? You IP address management may start in the form of a spreadsheet. It may be more elaborate, and be database backed. You may want to tie it in to a NMS or something. There's a lot of scope in this area

Solution 2:

Just because the "default" mask for a space is something large doesn't mean you have to use that mask with that space.

I would pick a subnet in the 10/8 space, like 10.1.0.0/24. This would give you room to grow in the future (ie add 10.1.1.0/24 for new space in the current site, and 10.2.0.0/24 for an alternate site).

For larger initial sites, we usually use a /20 network -- that would give you 10.0.0.0 through 10.0.15.255 to play with, or around 4094 individual IP addresses. That way you can allocate DHCP scopes in logical chunks (like 10.0.8.0 through 10.0.9.255) while allocating other specific addresses in specific places (ie we always put printers and networking gear in 10.0.15).

I would avoid using the whole 10/8 at once because if your network ever grows beyond around 4000 systems the arp noise is going to start taking a non-trivial amount of bandwidth.

I would avoid 192.168.0/24 and 192.168.1/24 because these are defaults for many consumer-grade home devices, and should you ever have to get into VPN access it will cause problems if your users home networks conflict with the "corporate" one.

I personally would avoid 192.168 totally because it doesn't flow off the fingers like the low-hanging fruit in 10.x does. On the other hand, if you have a site policy of avoiding 192.168, it makes it easy to use such addresses for local playing (ie VMware).

Solution 3:

There will be no difference for a such small network.
Just note that 172.16/12 is also reserved for private use. (172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255) (see RFC1918)

Solution 4:

Use 10.X.X.X it is often generally faster to type than 192.168.X.X. Other than that, there is no different except the number of supported hosts, not going into VLANs.