VLANS

INDEX

¡ VLANs: Applications & Concepts

1. VLAN tagging
2. VLAN awareness
3. VLAN association rules
4. Frame distribution
¡ VLANs: The IEEE Standard
¡ VLANs: Additional contents

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

(Rich Seifert, Jim Edwards)The All-New Switch Book,

2nd Ed. (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008)

Chapter 4 VLANs
Connecting VLANs
Configuring VLANs
Chapter 5 Trunking
How Trunks Work
Configuring Trunks

Examples based on IOS (Cisco)

Disclaimer: the instructor slides for this unit are just a class guide. They are not to
be used as study material for the exam. 3
 VLANS
APPLICATIONS & CONCEPS

Bibliography: Chapter-11
SOME REQUIREMENTS OF LANS

¡ Need to split up broadcast domains to make good use of

bandwidth
¡ People in the same department may need to be grouped
together for access to servers
¡ Security: restrict access of certain users to some areas of
the LAN
¡ Provide a way for different areas of the LAN to
communicate with each other

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SOLUTION USING ROUTERS

¡ Divide the LAN into

subnets
¡ Use routers to link the
subnets
BUT
¡ Routers are expensive
¡ Routers are slower than
switches
¡ Subnets are restricted to
limited physical areas
¡ Subnets are inflexible

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 SOLUTION USING VLAN

¡ What is a VLAN? à It is the territory over which a broadcast packet is

delivered. (Also known as a broadcast domain)
¡ VLAN membership can be by function and not by location
¡ VLANs managed by switches
¡ Router needed for communication between VLANs

¡ Can be seen as a group of end hosts, perhaps on multiple physical LAN

segments, that are not constrained by their physical location and can
communicate as if they were on a common LAN.
¡ VLAN awareness doesn’t provide any real benefit within a shared-
LAN environment. 7
APPLICATIONS OF VLANS

¡ The Software Patch

Panel

¡ LAN Security

¡ User Mobility

¡ Bandwidth Preservation

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 VLAN CONCEPTS

1. VLAN tagging
2. VLAN awareness
3. VLAN association rules
4. Frame distribution

¡ Two important observations:

¡ From the perspective of the VLAN-aware devices, only frames belong to a

VLAN, and not stations, protocols, or applications.
¡ A given frame is associated with a single VLAN.

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 TAGGING
q How can you tell which LAN(s) a frame is on?
q Implicit à Port-based (simple)
à Parse the frame and apply the membership rules (more complex).
• Data Link Source Address
• Protocol type
• Higher-layer network identifiers (for example, IP subnet)
• Application-specific fields, and so on

q Explicit à Provide an explicit VLAN identifier within the frame itself.

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TAGGING (CONT.)

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 VLAN AWARENESS

¡ What It Means to Be VLAN-Aware?

¡ Making frame forwarding decisions
based on the VLAN association of a
given frame
¡ If Tag-aware à Providing explicit VLAN
identification within transmitted frames
¡ Devices (Switches and Stations) can
be VLAN-aware or not
¡ Switches VLAN-aware can be Tag-
aware or not
¡ Stations VLAN-aware must be Tag-
aware (i.e. VoIP phones)

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 TAGGING AND TRUNKING

¡ Traffic for all the VLANs travels between the switches on a shared trunk or
backbone
¡ Tag is added to the frame when it goes on to the trunk
¡ Tag is removed when it leaves the trunk (if end-station are not Tag-aware)
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VLAN ASSOCIATION RULES
(MAPPING FRAMES TO VLANS)

1.- Port-Based 2.- MAC Address-Based

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VLAN ASSOCIATION RULES (..2)
(MAPPING FRAMES TO VLANS)

3.- IP Subnet-
Based

Switch Layer-3?,.. L4? 15

VLAN ASSOCIATION RULES (..3)
(MAPPING FRAMES TO VLANS)

4.- Protocol-Based 5.- Application-Based

6.- And more – mix(port/mac/time/day/…)

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VLAN ASSOCIATION RULES (..4)
(MAPPING FRAMES TO VLANS)

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FRAME FORWARDING

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 VLANS:
THE IEEE STANDARD

Bibliography: Chapter-12
TAGGED ETHERNET FRAME

§ Priority: [0..7]
§ Can be fixed by end-station
§ Can be based on application (i.e. VoIP)
§ …
§ Canonical Format Indicator (CFI)
§ bit ordering (Little or Big Endian) of bytes
§ Ethernet à LE, Token-Ring à BE

§ VLAN Identifier: [0x001.. 0xFFE]

§ 0x000 à Priority Tag
§ 0xFFF à reserved (unused) 20
 ETHERNET MTU INCREASES BY 4 BYTES!

The use of 802.1Q VLAN tags

could force the tagging device to
violate the IEEE 802.3 standard!

Solutions:
1. Leave the 802.3 frame limit intact, and take the 4 bytes needed for the VLAN tag from
the data portion of the frame. à Payload from 1500 to 1496 àProblem: Modify higher
layer (IP) protocol software.

1. Ignore the problem. (mid 1980 to mid 1990)

2. Increase the maximum length of the Ethernet frame à Problem: possibility of

incompatible legacy devices. à supplement IEEE 802.3ac (1998) à
[64..1518] to [64..1522] (not including Preamble).
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VLANS:
ADDITIONAL CONTENTS
LAYER 3 SWITCHING

¡ A Switch is a Bridge
¡ A Layer 3 Switch Is a Router

QoS y CoS
(AS) BGP

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DHCP RELAYING IN VLANS

¡ Goal: use a single DHCP server for clients in all VLANs

VLAN 40
10.100.40.0/24

DHCP Server
10.100.30.2/24
L3 Switch
VLAN 30

DHCP Relay
IP Helper address:
10.100.30.2

VLAN 50
10.100.50.0/24

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DHCP RELAYING IN VLANS
¡ DHCP Relaying message exchange

Broadcast Unicast

Broadcast Unicast

Broadcast Unicast

Broadcast Unicast

¡ Note: DHCP Server detects the source subnet à required to provide addresses in the
correct address range (10.0.1.0/24 in the example).

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VLANS & STP
¡ STP limitations in the presence of VLAN-based load
balancing
¡ Switch A uses VLANs 1-1000
¡ It wants to perform load balancing among switches D1 and D2
¡ A-D1 link: VLANs 1-500; A-D2 link: VLANS 501-1000

¡ D1-D2 link is used for fault tolerance

¡ If D1 is root, VLANs 501-1000 are blocked
¡ If D2 is root, VLANS 1-500 are blocked

¡ Per VLAN Spanning-Tree is desirable to support load balancing

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PVST+

¡ Per-Vlan Spanning Tree plus (PVST+)

¡ Cisco proprietary solution

¡ PVST+ creates an STP instance for each VLAN

¡ Advantage:
¡ Every VLAN may use its own root bridge and forwarding topology,
allowing for a more fair resource utilization.
¡ Disadvantage:
¡ As many STP instances as VLANs
¡ 1000 VLANs = 1000 STP instances !!!

¡ But,
¡ For each LAN, only a very limited set of topologies is possible
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MST

¡ Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MST)

¡ Inspired by Cisco’s PVST+ protocol
¡ Standardized as 802.1s

¡ Advantages of MST:
¡ MST supports 16 STP instances (MSTI)
¡ Each MSTI has its own STP topology
¡ Each MSTI can map an unlimited number of VLANs

¡ When MSTP is enabled, RSTP is essentially enabled as well.

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COMPARISON BETWEEN PVST+ AND MST

¡ MST achieves similar effectiveness with much fewer Spanning Trees (2 vs. 6)
¡ VLANs 1,3,5 are mapped to MST 0
¡ VLANs 2,4,6 are mapped to MST 1

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