Talk:VLAN/Archive 1

taking vlan trunks into a host

is it possible if say a server is short on network cards to take a vlan trunk into the server and de-mulitplex it in software rather than connecting the server to a port on every vlan? Plugwash 04:53, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, if the server supports 802.1q. Keep in mind that "trunk" is not a standard term (although commonly used by Cisco and others), so look for 802.1q or vlan tags, not trunks in the server documentation. Some products use "trunk" to mean something entirely different, so this can get confusing.

this is certainly possible; on Linux you need a small program to configure the driver, though not all cards are physically able to do 802.1q IIRC. On Windoz it is similar - the network interface manufacturer will usually supply a utility to configure the driver. --Ali@gwc.org.uk 10:57, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

I just want to mention this article does a good job on describing what need to be done to make host vlan aware [1]

link to vlan faq just advertisment

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Isnt the link to the FAQ just advertisment for ZeroShell? 213.3.23.38 22:23, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

ok

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

VLAN 1

Virtual Local Area Networks often referred to as VLANS are basically configured to separate the broadcast domain in a switch. Now suppose there is a switch which has 100 ports out of which 40 belong to the marketing department of a company and rest 60 belong to sales. Now if marketing department never use data broadcasted by the sales department, then there is no use sending this data to them whenever a computer in the sales department broadcasts a piece of information and actually there is a disadvantage in doing so, it just encourages congestion in the network. So to solve this problem, the concept of VLANs was introduced. What Vlan will do is, it will divide a switch into two different broadcast domains, so even if somebody in sales does a broadcast, the particular data wont go to people in marketing, which is quite advantageous.

But its important to remember that by default all the ports in a new switch belong to Vlan 1, and this Vlan 1 can never be deleted or edited, but we can make more vlans and assign each port to a particular Vlan.This way the broadcast domain can be changed.

What is this "VLAN 1" (mentioned above and in a free-floating sentence on the main page). Nowhere has the concept of naming VLANs been introduced or any explanation of how they are named or numbered. It sounds to me like "VLAN 1" might be part of a particular scheme of VLANs, and so this information has little to do with VLANs in general. Is it a tip to do with a particular manufacturer's VLAN system? As a newcomer trying to read the main article this information seems out of place and irrelevant. Chard 17:49, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree, and removed the following statement:

VLAN 1 is the default VLAN; it can never be deleted. All untagged traffic falls into this VLAN by default.

Whether VLAN 1 is default or can be deleted is up to the switch manufacturer. Untagged traffic uses whatever VLAN is defined as "native" when using 801.2q or when the port is on only one VLAN. --Rick Sidwell 01:18, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Single wire = hub not switch

"A VLAN consists of a network of computers that behave as if connected to the same wire"

Doesn't this incorrectly imply a VLAN is a single collision domain?

I suppose that could be a source of confusion- I've changed the language in question. --Clay Collier 02:19, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

History of VLANs

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After reading the history section and reading things that were rather absurd, I downloaded and read the referenced articles. Whoever wrote the history section clearly read those articles, but did not understand them. Almost every sentence in the section gets fundamental things wrong; e.g. a voice network does not require a terabit of bandwidth to be successful, merely that was the estimated bandwidth of the U.S. telephone network in its entirety at the time. It reminds me of a well written troll, a segment of the British sitcom "The IT Crowd", or gibberish you get after a game of telephone. The references are valuable, but the entire section needs to be rewritten from scratch. Obscuranym (talk) 04:38, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

If you think you have a better understanding of the topic, please don't just scold the rest of us about how it should be done. Instead, be bold and fix it yourself, in the manner you think needs to be done. DMahalko (talk) 22:06, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

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VLAN is not only IEEE 802.1Q

This article is Virtual LAN, not Ethernet VLAN nor IEEE 802.1Q. Even if the latter is the predominant technology today.

I think it could be interesting to add more emphasis on legacy or alternate technologies. For historical considerations as well as for easier understanding of the concept.

As an example, in the book Virtual LANs (ISBN 047-1177326) p.234, there's a reference to an earlier (?) technology called Intelligent Wiring Hub. According to the book, it is based on time division multiplexing to partition the backplane channel. Resulting on temporal multiplexing of several logical LAN on the same physical LAN. By googling a little, I found some references to this technology to share a backbone bandwidth between several LAN protocols (namely Ethernet and TokenRing). See the press article Wiring hub ties Ethernet, TokenRing over FDDI.

- Sylvain Leroux (talk) 10:56, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

"using them for the original purpose would be rather unusual"

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What does it mean under history where it says "using them for the original purpose would be rather unusual"? Is the original, deprecated purpose combining multiple ethernets together, or eliminating bottlenecks? It's not clear. Family Guy Guy (talk) 02:48, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Virtual network merge

I'm not convinced that Virtual network is related to VLAN. I've started a discussion. Let's get this resolved before attempting a merge. --Kvng (talk) 18:19, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

I'd suggest they are not the same and should not be merged. Specifically, a VLAN is configured on a physical switch to segregate broadcast domains. A virtual network is configured within a virtual environment. For example, I can run multiple virtual machines on a single server and use a virtual network to connect them. I can then choose to connect the virtual network to the host computer, to the outside network that the host computer is connected to, or leave the virtual network isolated from the host and the physical network. - DRG 28 Feb 2012

no merge - VLAN is a network virtualization technique, but it's not (commonly) the same as a virtual network. Virtual network (virtual switch): Layers 1&2, VLAN: Layer 2, VPN: Layer 3. Zac67 (talk) 14:28, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

I removed the merge banners. --Kvng (talk) 01:22, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Intro missing the point?

After reading and rereading the first paragraph I'm afraid that it misses the point. VLAN isn't about joining parts together to a larger broadcast domain - that you can easily do by chaining switches -, it's rather about partitioning a physical network infrastructure into virtual separated domains. In terms of network virtualization, you're building virtual (layer 2) networks on top of an existing network. Additionally, joining hosts together to a broadcast domain regardless of physical location sounds more like a bridiging job (possibly with tunnelling/VPN) and isn't really about VLAN. Is it? Zac67 (talk) 21:17, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't think there's anything technically wrong with what exists in the lead but I think it does need to mention partitioning and VLAN tagging. --Kvng (talk) 13:50, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Nothing technically wrong but obscuring the main point (see "VLAN vs. WAN" below). I've tried a more straightforward approach while conserving as much possible of the previous version. Zac67 (talk) 16:44, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

VLAN vs. WAN

Would it be a lot of a hassle to make a section contrasting a VLAN from a WAN explaining why they differ from each other? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.132.1.160 (talk) 13:20, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I've reworked the lead paragraph more to the point, hope everything becomes clearer now: VLAN is a technique of partitioning a local network while WAN is a general term for an extremely large network. Zac67 (talk) 16:44, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Number of VLANs.

As we know that a single port can support 2 vlans one for data and for voice. though how and why does a switch support so many or thousands of vlans? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 111.235.149.86 (talk) 10:19, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

A single physical port can support up to 4095 VLANs (coventional) or even up to 16.8 million with IEEE 802.1aq (Shortest Path Bridging). Zac67 (talk) 17:59, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

About talk membership.

I tried to insert it in the article but was too bad formatted (i wrote it in open office). So, since i'm against losing contributions (not really lost since there is the history) at least i try to put the contribution in the nearest page to the article, its talk page. Moreover i believe that when there is a contribution, even "not acceptable" the community is more willing to take actions, instead when there is nothing, well nothing happens. So here it is, i have to use the "pre" tag to format it quickly.

How to decode a VLAN definition with small examples.
Using the information from the 3com manual (1) we can say that:
  1. A not member port is not belonging to the VLAN, so packets that are
  coming in those ports are not considerered, and no packets of the
  VLAN are sent out from those ports.
  For example the port 5 is not member of the VLAN "Gäste", so the
  packets incoming from that port are not considered and no packet is
  sent from that port (unless special rules applies but we don't use
  them, normally).
  
  2. An untagged port can exist in only one VLAN. That is, the port 6 is
  untagged in the VLAN "VoIP" and cannot be present as untagged in the
  other VLANs (can be present in other VLANs only as tagged, see
  later). Packet that are coming in the untagged port are modified as
  follows:
    2.1 If the packet has no VLAN id, then is tagged with the VLAN id of
    the VLAN to which the port belongs.
    For example if an untagged packet goes in to the port 6 and the
    port 6 is belonging to: VID 2 as untagged port, VID 3 as tagged
    port, VID 4 as tagged port; then the packet will be assigned to
    the VLAN that contains the port 6 as untagged, thus it will get
    the VID 2.
    2.2 If a packet has a VID set then it is accepted only if the VID
    match with the VID of the VLAN that contains the untagged port,
    else is discarded (unless the port is present in other VLAN as
    tagged, see later).
    For Example a packet with VID 1 goes in the port 6 that is
    belonging to the VLAN with VID 2 as untagged, it is discarded,
    while a packet with VID 2 is accepted.
  Packets that are coming out of the untagged port will be modified as
  follows:
    2.3 If the untagged port belongs to the default VLAN and the packet
    VID is the same of the default VLAN VID, then unset the packet
    VID and send the packet out.
    Otherwise if the untagged port belongs to a VLAN that is not a
    default one, send the packet without changing its VID value.
    (the rule No.1 will avoid to send packets from ports that
    doesn't belong to the VLAN of the packet).
    For example if the default VLAN has id 5, and the port 34 is
    beloning to the default VLAN as untagged, a packet with VID 5
    will be sent from this port with the VID value cleared.
    Instead if the port 34 is beloning to the VLAN "Gäste", with VID
    3, as untagged, a packet with VID 3 will be sent from this port
    with the VID value unchanged.
    
  3. A port that is tagged can be tagged in several VLANs, plus it can be
  present as untagged in one further VLAN. Packets that are coming in
  the tagged port are handled as follows:
    3.1 If the packet has the same VID of the VLAN that contains the
    port, it will be accepted, else will be discared. If no VID is
    set, either the rules for untagged port applied when the port is
    present as untagged in one VLAN, or the packet is discarded.
    For example if the port 3 is present as tagged in the VLANs with
    VIDs 3, 4, 5. Then a packet with VID 3 will be accepted and
    routed in the VLAN with VID 3, a packet with VID 4 will be
    accepted and routed in the VLAN with VID 4 and so on. A packet
    with VID 2 will be discarded.
  Packets that are coming out from the port are handled as follows:
    3.2 The packet will have the VID set to the value of the VLAN.VID
    that is handling it.
    For example a packet of the VLAN with VID 3 is going out from
    the tagged port, it will have the VID set to 3.

(1)3Com Switch 4210G Family , Configuration Guide. Page 6-6

--91.66.224.104 (talk) 08:27, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Article title: "VLAN" or "Virtual LAN"

VLANs are much more commonly called VLANs than Virtual LANs, so I'm surprised that VLAN redirects to Virtual LAN. I think that the non-redirected article title should be VLAN, and Virtual LAN (and Virtual Local Area Network) should redirect to VLAN. Pelago (talk) 11:02, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I concur; in most documentation I've seen, the term is usually "VLAN". But then we're almost always talking about 802.11q; does anyone who still deals with older equipment have any guidance on the naming?

Having said that, the way this article is structured, 802.11q is really the only thing being talked about, and furthermore the "concept" of VLAN is being conflated with "tag numbering".

We need to make much clearer the distinction between "VLAN" (an ethernet broadcast domain) and "VLID" (the numbers used for tagging packets on a particular link between routers), since the latter can vary within a VLAN when more than 2 routers are involved.

12:45, 31 December 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martin Kealey (talk • contribs)

To achieve accessibility by novices, we try to avoid acronyms in titles. That has to be balanced against the situation where some concepts are known almost exclusively by their acronyms and nobody knows what they stand for. I think the current title strikes a good balance. ~KvnG 14:43, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

There has been this dilution of what VLANs implied as a layer 2 concept, and what 'tagged' VLANs as a layer 3 concept are good for. There were fundamental security features at layer 2 that cannot (IMO) be implemented as effectively at layer 3 (in software). You could run 2 subnets that were essentially completely isolated from one another at L2. I have L3 switches and full blown routers and right now I'm about ready to replace my L3 switches and go back to L2. I think its an important distinction and you risk losing that knowledge when you blur the lines between the two. Frankly, if the two had been introduced to me as two separate concepts from the very beginning, it probably would have saved me tons of frustration along the way. Its important to understand the fundamental differences between layers in the OSI model. It may seem minor, but you won't get anywhere if you're building on a poor foundation. 68.32.133.168 (talk) 07:08, 8 November 2016 (UTC)