We're designing a somewhat large system that we're not really qualified to design. It will be something like a campus: one main, large network, with about 20 sub-networks that are like departments with a few subnets for different labs or subsystems that need to be on their own VLANS.
The debate is, should we try to get each department it's own IP space, or use the same space for each department and hide behind NAT. Either way there will be decent, layer 3 switches for the gateway of each department.
The argument for using the same scope over and over is that it will be easier to configure these cookie-cutter subsystems the same for each department. There are a lot of non-pc, non-network-device devices in the systems that need to be manually configured with static IPs. The plan for administering these devices remotely is to open a couple ports in the NAT to vnc/remote-desktop to a PC inside. Then use the applications installed on that PC and web-guis to manage the devices. I think the NAT table will just grow and grow, but at least the config will be able to be easily duplicated to all the routers.
I feel like you lose a lot of advanced networking features by doing it that way. Off the top of my head: central dns and dhcp services, deploying OS images over the network to crashed machines, deploying configuration and media...
What else?
Feel free to edit my title and post to make more sense. Should I make a drawing?
non-network-device
needs an IP address... If there is no network, how is there IP?