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December 8th, 2003 00:00
Newbie on VLANs question
I have the following questions on VLANs as I am very new to this concept. If I create 5 different VLANs and the VLANs do not pass traffic to one another without a router, how would I be able to communicate with a server or printer if it is on another VLAN? The reason I ask is I would like to separate my flat network into 5 different VLANs. V1 for servers and printers and V2-V5 for separating users by department. By doing this, I am trying to reduce the amount of traffic on my network.
My network is very simple and small. Here is my network setup:
3 servers: Mail, Data/Application, Print
15 network printers
35+ workstations
2 switches: 3024 and 5224
The switches are connected to the servers via CAT5e running at 1 Gig.
Is this possible without a router?
Regards,
Matt
Andrew_Hicks1
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169 Posts
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December 8th, 2003 12:00
To answer your question simply: No.
Not only will you need a Layer-3 device(such as a router), but you will need one that supports 802.1q encapsulation. Without that capability, the Layer-3 device won't be able to pass frames for multiple VLANs across its uplink ports.
The easiest way to configure this would be to place the router between the two switches you have, and configure subinterfaces for the two uplinks on the router - each subinterface(and therefore, each VLAN) will need to be in a seperate subnet. (i.e. 192.168.1.0 for VLAN 1, 192.168.2.0 for VLAN 2, etc.). This will allow the layer-3 device to route between the VLANs. You'll then configure VLAN trunking on both ends of the uplinks to pass the appropriate VLAN traffic.
For the most part, you shouldn't need to segment the network with such a small network - usually it's when you get in excess of several hundred total systems that you might want to start thinking of segmenting a flat network. If, however, you're trying to segment the network for security reasons, then the use of VLANs is likely your best bet.