SMC Networks SMC6750L2 manual Assigning Ports to VLANs

CONFIGURING THE SWITCH

VLANs help to simplify network management by allowing you to move devices to a new VLAN without having to change any physical connections. VLANs can be easily organized to reflect departmental groups (such as Marketing or R&D), usage groups (such as e-mail), or multicast groups (used for multimedia applications such as videoconferencing).

VLANs provide greater network efficiency by reducing broadcast traffic, and allow you to make network changes without having to update IP addresses or IP subnets. VLANs inherently provide a high level of network security since traffic must pass through a configured Layer 3 link to reach a different VLAN.

•Up to 255 VLANs based on the IEEE 802.1Q standard

•Distributed VLAN learning across multiple switches using explicit or implicit tagging

•Port overlapping, allowing a port to participate in multiple VLANs

•End stations can belong to multiple VLANs

•Passing traffic between VLAN-aware and VLAN-unaware devices

•Priority tagging

Assigning Ports to VLANs

Before enabling VLANs for the switch, you must first assign each port to the VLAN group(s) in which it will participate. By default all ports are assigned to VLAN 1 as untagged ports. Add a port as a tagged port (that is, a port attached to a VLAN-aware device) if you want it to carry traffic for one or more VLANs and if the device at the other end of the link also supports VLANs. Then assign the port at the other end of the link to the same VLAN(s). However, if you want a port on this switch to participate

2-42