VLANS - advice needed

[mdrabble]

Just introduced VLAN and so far it has been a slow process but all going well so far.

 

There are currently 20 VLANs configured and wondered if those more experienced using VLANs could answer a couple of questions.

 

 

Quick example -

We have IP Phones on our network (on their own VLAN) but not all the edge switches have IP Phones connected to them. Do we need to tag the uplink ports on the core switch those edge switches which do not have IP Phones on them?

 

We are thinking if they are not tagged then there is less traffic to be routed to switches that do not need them. (Does this make sense?) or should we tag all VLANs on all uplink ports?

 

Thanks

Mark

[localzuk]

Both ends of any 'trunked' links (ie. the uplinks) should match - so, if you have your IP phone VLAN set to send traffic *to* an edge switch, it should know about it the other end too.

 

However, if you don't have any devices that will be on that VLAN on that edge switch you don't need to tag it as such. But I'd advise to, so you have a 'standardised' setup for all your VLANs and switches, making it easier for changes in the future.

[jonnykewell1]

If you are using cisco switches you could use VTP to spread the VLAN'S across to the other switches, then enable pruning so only the VLAN'S needed by the specific switch are shared.

[mdrabble]

Thanks for the replies and confirming our thoughts.

 

I would love to have cisco kit but sadly cannot afford them so having to stick with the current Netgear kit which does the job but is a bit of a pain having to use a web interface on the edge kit.

[koffi2k]

While VTP is a Cisco-only thing, there are 2 other similar, yet standards-based protocols called GVRP (GARP VLAN registration procol) and the newer MVRP (multiple vlan registration protocol) that are standards-based.

Although I don't use GVRP (I only have 4 VLANs), it is a feature present on our fully managed Netgears.

 

Do you happen to have only their smart managed switches or fully managed ones with serial console ports? If you have the later one, enable SSH on them (disabled by default) and jump to the CLI, it's way quicker to manage VLANs there than on their sluggish Webinterface. On the plus side: Netgear's CLI interface is very (very) similar to Cisco IOS. If you understand one of them, you'll understand the other quickly too.

 

Even on their smart switches you can export the text config as HTTP download or to a TFTP server. As long as you don't mess up the syntax (pretty much identical to the syntax of the syntax of fully managed switches too) you can edit the text config and re-upload it to the switch to apply it.