Understanding VLAN Trunking Protocol and VirtualConnect

chuckk281 — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:25:19 GMT

Scott needed some clarification around VLAN Trunking Protocol(VTP):

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I understand we don’t support Cisco’s proprietary VTP and I have to admit I don’t fully understand it and it a bit over my head but a customer has asked;

If a VTP domain is presented to a VC uplink port (a number of Trunked VLAN’s) can the VC see the VLANS if individually added to the port profile in VC?

When VTP domains have similar VLAN’s, i.e VTP #1 has VLAN1 and VTD #2 has a VLAN1 can these VLANS be isolated between servers, or assigned to different servers? Or is this question completely irrelevant?

Maybe I need to ask how somebody using VTP domains connects to VC?

Thanks in advance and sorry if this is a dumb question.

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But to Paul there are no dumb questions:

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So, from Cisco defining VTP

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk689/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094c52.shtml

VLAN Trunk Protocol (VTP) reduces administration in a switched network. When you configure a new VLAN on one VTP server, the VLAN is distributed through all switches in the domain. This reduces the need to configure the same VLAN everywhere. VTP is a Cisco-proprietary protocol that is available on most of the Cisco Catalyst series products.

So, VTP does nothing but propogate the VLAN config throughout the Cisco environment. The fact that a VLAN was created on a switch via VTP doesn’t change how the VLAN works, nothing special about it.

Within a layer 2 network ( a collision domain, everything on the same side of a router), VLANx =VLANx=VLANx.

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Hopes this helps. Do you use VTP from Cisco?

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Understanding VLAN Trunking Protocol and VirtualConnect