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Table of Contents
Switching

 Unit 1: Switching Basics

 Unit 2: VLANs and Trunking

Introduction to VLANs (Virtual LAN)

How to con gure VLANs

802.1Q Encapsulation

How to con gure a trunk between switches

How to change the Native VLAN

Cisco DTP (Dynamic Trunking Protocol) Negotiation

802.1Q Tunneling (Q-in-Q)

Etherchannel over 802.1Q Tunneling

Private VLANs (PVLAN)

InterVLAN Routing

Troubleshooting VLANs & Trunks

Troubleshooting Inter-VLAN Routing

 Unit 3: VTP (VLAN Trunking Protocol)

 Unit 4: Spanning-Tree

 Unit 5: Etherchannel

 Unit 6: Virtualization

 Unit 7: Design

 Unit 8: Security

 Unit 9: Miscellaneous

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You are here: Home » Switching

Introduction to VLANs
In this lesson we will take a look at VLANs (Virtual LANs) and I will explain what they are and
why we need them.

06:18

First of all let me show you a picture of a network:

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Look at this picture for a minute, we have many departments and every department has its
own switch. Users are grouped physically together and are connected to their switch. what do
you think of it? Does this look like a good network design? If you are unsure let me ask you
some questions to think about:

What happens when a computer connected to the Research switch sends a broadcast like
an ARP request?
What happens when the Helpdesk switch fails?
Will our users at the Human Resource switch have fast network connectivity?
How can we implement security in this network?

Now tell me explain you why this is a bad network design. If any of our computers sends a
broadcast what will our switches do? They ood it! This means that a single broadcast frame
will be ooded on this entire network. This also happens when a switch hasn’t learned about a
certain MAC address, the frame will be ooded.

If our helpdesk switch would fail this means that users from Human Resource are “isolated”
from the rest and unable to access other departments or the internet, this applies to other
switches as well. Everyone has to go through the Helpdesk switch in order to reach the Internet

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which means we are sharing bandwidth, probably not a very good idea performance-wise.

Last but not least, what about security? We could implement port-security and lter on MAC
addresses but that’s not a very secure method since MAC addresses are very easy to spoof.
VLANs are one way to solve our problems.

One more question I’d like to ask you to refresh your knowledge:

How many broadcast domains do we have here?

What about broadcast domains? We didn’t talk about this before but I think you can answer it. If
a computer from the sales switch would send a broadcast frame we know that all other
switches will forward it. Did you spot the router on top of the picture? What about it…do you
think a router will forward a broadcast frame?
[teaser]

The answer is that routers don’t forward broadcast frames so they e ectively “limit” our
broadcast domain. Of course on the right side of our router where we have an Internet
connection this would be another broadcast domain…so we have 2 broadcast domains here.
Let’s see how we can improve things…

When you work with switches you have to keep in mind there’s a big di erence between
physical and logical topology. Physical is just the way our cables are connected while logical is
how we have setup things ‘virtually’. In the example above we have 4 switches and I have
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created 3 VLANs called Research, Engineering and Sales. A VLAN is a Virtual LAN so it’s like
having a “switch inside a switch”.

What are the advantages of using VLANs?

A VLAN is a single broadcast domain which means that if a user in the research VLAN would
send a broadcast frame only users in the same VLAN will receive it.
Users are only able to communicate within the same VLAN unless you use a router.
Users don’t have to be grouped physically together, as you can see we have users in the
Engineering VLAN sitting on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd oor.

That’s all for now. I hope this has given you an idea of what VLANs are and why we use them! If
you enjoyed this lesson please leave a comment.

« Previous Lesson
Troubleshooting Interfaces
Next Lesson
How to con gure VLANs »
 Tags: VLAN

Forum Replies

hussien.samer

Hi Rene,

I learned from http://www.netcontractor.pl/blog/?p=184 that control tra c from Layer 2 protocols like (
DTP, VTP , CDP , PAgP , STP, etc ) use VLAN 1.

And I make sure of that by doing this experience :

- I made a simple topology of connection two switches and making connectivity as trunk.
- I made one switch VTP server and another as VTP client.
- I also setup RSPAN to monitor the packets.
- Results, I saw VTP, CDP tra c marked with VLAN ID 1.
- Then, I made another vlan and disallowed Vlan 1 in the trunk.
- Results still the same.
- I thought it

... Continue reading in our forum

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ReneMolenaar

Hi Daniel,

There’s a “technical” and “practical” aspect to this question

Let’s start with the technical part…a lot of networking people will tell you that you shouldn’t have > 200
hosts in a subnet since there will be too much broadcast tra c and it will slow down your network. This
might be true 10 years ago but nowadays, your computers won’t be bothered much with broadcast tra c
and it shouldn’t be an issue for your switches. You could probably put ~1000 hosts in a single subnet and
not notice any performance issues.

The more important issue (the practic

... Continue reading in our forum

wilder7bc

Hi I think I may have gotten a bad prep exam question as I cannot get it to work in labs and it does not
make sense fully to me from how I learned VLANS. I will upload the practice test question from Boson and
would like input please.

//cdn-
forum.networklessons.com/uploads/default/original/1X/05b2d7038e648c45e08123c84caf728638301b4b.JPG

above is what they say is the answer and the topology its very brief. and below is their explanation.

//cdn-
forum.networklessons.com/uploads/default/original/1X/6cb467368403ad27ae72143183da8d340c120a6b.JPG

Now I tried this in

... Continue reading in our forum

lagapides

Hello Justin

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Let’s say a switch has 24 access ports where ports 1-12 are on VLAN 10 and ports 13-24 are on VLAN 20.
Let’s say a broadcast frame is sent on port 1. The switch will receive that frame and send it out of ports 2
to 12. Why? Because it knows that it entered port 1, therefore it is on VLAN 10, therefore it will send it out
of all ports that have been con gured on VLAN 10. It doesn’t even look at the details of the frame itself,
because there is no data in the frame that gives the switch VLAN information. The information comes only
from the fac

... Continue reading in our forum

wellerk.scott

Laz,

All of your posts are extremely well written. Thank you for explaining things much simpler than I can
Thanks,
Scott

 46 more replies! Ask a question or join the discussion by visiting our Community Forum

Hello There!
I am René Molenaar (CCIE #41726), Your main Instructor. My goal is to teach
you everything about Cisco, Wireless and Security. I am here to Help You
Master Networking!

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