Management VLAN Usage

[tommyv]

Hi all,

We are currently in the process of hardening our switches based on the Procurve hardening guide.  We are planning on enabling a management VLAN on the switches however I have one query.  The guide states that ONLY Procurve switches and Procurve management software should exist on this VLAN.  We were planning on using the management VLAN as the management network for all restricted network device interfaces (SAN's/IMM's/Switches/PDU's/anything sysadmin).  So I guess my question is this, is there any practical reason why we can't use the management VLAn for managing our other restricted devices as well?

Many Thanks

[DMoh]

The "management VLAN" command, only limits management connections (telnet/SSH/HTTP/HTTPS) to the switch to hosts residing in that vlan. It would have no effect on devices other than the switch that has this enabled.

[paulgear]

There's no hard & fast rule that says you can only use management VLANs for ProCurve devices. As dmoh has said, it only affects where the management connections can originate from. (Incidentally, SNMP is one of those as well.) I frequently include server & SAN management interfaces on my management VLANs.