HP Network Direr Software Products manual Benefits of VLANs, Network Setup Showing Three VLANs

Key Concepts 501

Figure 259 A Network Setup Showing Three VLANs

Benefits of VLANs

The main benefit of VLANs is that they provide a network segmentation system that is far more flexible than any traditional network. Using VLANs also provides you with other benefits:

■VLANs ease the movement of devices on networks. With traditional networks, network administrators spend much of their time dealing with moves and changes. If users move to a different subnetwork, the addresses of each end station must be updated manually. With a VLAN setup, if an end station in VLAN Marketing for example is moved to a port in another part of the network, and retains its original subnet membership, you only need to specify that the new port is in VLAN Marketing. You do not need to carry out any re-cabling.

■VLANs provide extra security. Devices within each VLAN can only communicate with other devices in the same VLAN. If a device in VLAN Marketing needs to communicate with devices in VLAN Finance, the traffic must pass through a routing device or Layer 3 switch.

■VLANs help to control traffic. If a bridge port in a traditional LAN switching device receives a packet with a broadcast, multicast, or unknown destination address, it forwards the packet to all other bridge ports. This process is referred to as bridge flooding. As