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3. Configuring Switching Information
Use the features in the Switching tab to define Layer 2 features. The Switching tab contains links
to the following features:
• VLANs on page 119
• Auto-VoIP Configuration on page 134
• iSCSI on page 139
• Spanning Tree Protocol on page 143
• Multicast on page 156
• MVR Configuration on page 173
• Address Table on page 177
• Ports on page 181
• Link Aggregation Groups on page 184
VLANs
Adding Virtual LAN (VLAN) support to a Layer 2 switch offers some of the benefits of both
bridging and routing. Like a bridge, a VLAN switch forwards traffic based on the Layer 2
header, which is fast, and like a router, it partitions the network into logical segments, which
provides better administration, security and management of multicast traffic.
By default, all ports on the switch are in the same broadcast domain. VLANs electronically
separate ports on the same switch into separate broadcast domains so that broadcast
packets are not sent to all the ports on a single switch. When you use a VLAN, users can be
grouped by logical function instead of physical location.
Each VLAN in a network has an associated VLAN ID, which appears in the IEEE 802.1Q tag
in the Layer 2 header of packets transmitted on a VLAN. An end station may omit the tag, or
the VLAN portion of the tag, in which case the first switch port to receive the packet may
either reject it or insert a tag using its default VLAN ID. A given port may handle traffic for
more than one VLAN, but it can only support one default VLAN ID.
From the VLAN link, you can access the following pages:
• Basic on page 120
• Advanced on page 122