Configuring and managing ports and VLANs 121

Nortel WLAN—Security Switch 2300 Series Configuration Guide
VLAN Name—This attribute is a Nortel vendor-specific attribute (VSA).
Specify the VLAN name, not the VLAN number. The examples in this chapter assume the VLAN is assigned on a
RADIUS server with either of the valid attributes. (For more information, see “Configuring AAA for network users” on
page 541.)

VLAN names

To create a VLAN, you must assign a name to it. VLAN names must be globally unique across a Mobility Domain to
ensure the intended user connectivity as determined through authentication and authorization.
Every VLAN on a WSS has both a VLAN name, used for authorization purposes, and a VLAN number. VLAN numbers
can vary uniquely for each WSS and are not related to 802.1Q tag values.
You cannot use a number as the first character in a VLAN name.

Roaming and VLANs

WSSs in a Mobility Domain contain a user’s traffic within the VLAN that the user is assigned to. For example, if you
assign a user to VLAN red, the WSSs in the Mobility Domain contain the user’s traffic within VLAN red configured on
the switches.
The WSS through which a user is authenticated is not required to be a member of the VLAN the user is assigned to. You
are not required to configure the VLAN on all WSSs in the Mobility Domain. When a user roams to a switch that is not
a member of the VLAN the user is assigned to, the switch can tunnel traffic for the user through another switch that is a
member of the VLAN. The traffic can be of any protocol type. (For more information about Mobility Domains, see
“Configuring and managing Mobility Domain roaming” on page 215.)

Traffic forwarding

A WSS switches traffic at Layer 2 among ports in the same VLAN. For example, suppose you configure ports 4 and 5 to
belong to VLAN 2 and ports 6 and 7 to belong to VLAN 3. As a result, traffic between port 4 and port 5 is switched, but
traffic between port 4 and port 6 is not switched and needs to be routed by an external router.
Note. You cannot configure the Tunnel-Private-Group-ID attribute in the local user
database.
Note. Because the default VLAN (VLAN 1) might not be in the same subnet on each
switch, Nortel recommends that you do not rename the default VLAN or use it for user
traffic. Instead, configure other VLANs for user traffic.