VLAN tagging

[MultiCam]

Excuse me if this is a simple question but I am relatively new to the world of VLANS.. We purchased a 5412zl and some 2910al-48G's to upgrade our switching infrastructure. We were coming from a flat network and we will be segmenting some things into VLANS.

My question is, we are a factory and the stretch between the front of the factory and the back is longer than the limit for a single ethernet cable run, so we use a switch in between as a repeater. This has worked well over the years. I am fairly confident that the switch does not support 802.1q so my question is, will VLAN traffic be dropped when it reaches this switch or will it pass through and be picked up by the next switch which is 802.1q aware?

[Richard Brodie_1]

It's likely to work fine for a simple level 2 switch; my preference would be to have a long run like that in fibre but whatever works.

[paulgear]

Richard is right about the fibre, but unless the unmanaged switch is very old, it should still work. Most unmanaged switches these days actually allow 1504-byte frames instead of 1500 to allow the extra room for the VLAN header.

[tschaps]

With the money you spent on the 5412zl and 2910al-48G's, why subject your setup to a point of failure like a cheap, unmanaged switch in the middle? Either get a decent managed switch (which you could also use to distribute wireless now or in the future) or get a custom fiber cable manufactured to your length needs (probably cheaper than you think) and link up your switches the right way.

If you go with a better switch, be sure to install it with a UPS backup battery so power fluctuations don't knock your network offline.

Good luck--