Basic 802.1q question

[Charlie S.]

I was configuring these HP switches for the first time (i'm more familiar with cisco) and I was unclear about how to configure them as far as best practice goes for VLANing.


I have a 5300 with 3x2600 switches attached. From CLI, I have created 4 new vlans + the 1 st vlan.


The questiong is, this the best way, or should I have 1 vlan on the 5300, and then extend it to the 2600, and then create a new vlan on it?
Or should I create all the vlans on the 5300, and then create a second vlan on the remote switch?

Also, what should I do with vlan 1? have no ports in it?

Thanks for any help!

On a cisco switch I woudld have just trunked the ports and it would have taken care of the details.

[Eirram_1 · Accepted solution]

Hello Charlie,

What Cisco calls VLAN trunking, Procurve calls VLAN tagging. It is not clear to me what it is, you precisely want to achieve.

Good practise is to leave VLAN_1 as it is, and create extra VLANs as you need them. You can have multiple statically defined VLANs travel over a single physical port (Tagging, Cisco speak; Trunking). The switch on the other side can be in GVRP mode and will pick up VLAN IDs (read the specific section about GVRP for the details on this). Personally I do not like GVRP, but this is just an opinion.

The best way to configure is as always; it depends :-)

[Charlie S.]

Thanks for the response. I think a light went on before I submitted my last response.
To have the 5300 do the layer 3, I think i would need to define all of the vlans on it. If I left all the switches in the same common vlan on the 2600 uplink, and created a second vlan on the 2600's, than they would need to do layer 3 to get the data accross. From an early post I read about the limted mac table on the 2600's ,I will probably want to do all the routing on the 5300.

Does that compute? Thanks,C

[Matt Hobbs]

Yep, it would be better to have only the 5300 performing the routing if possible. Create the necessary VLANs on both the 5300 and the 2600 and enable tagging for those VLANs on the port that interconnects them.