vlan shutdown

[joeblough]

Good Day,

I apologize that this post is a little sketchy. I thought I was doing something simple, but have a strange outcome, and little time to correct it.

I work at a large residential facility associated with a major university. Presently, we have seven subnets serving our residents.

We will be setting up a test environment tomorrow to evaluate a third party access control system.

To simulate our network, I pulled an under-utilized 2900XL switch from out production environment. This switch had Vlan1 disabled, and Vlan2 as the management Vlan. No trunking involved.

I disabled Vlan2, and created Vlans 3-9 and assigned two ports to each Vlan. The remaining ports are still assigned to the disabled Vlan2.

The #sh vlan command reveals that Vlans 3-9 are active and the correct ports are assigned.

However, #sh run indicates that all but one are shutdown. I tried no shutdown, but there was no change. I then shutdown the active Vlan (Vlan 3) ran a no shutdown command on Vlan 4, and it was up.

So, there's something going on here that is allowing only one Vlan at a time to be up.

Wiping the entire config is an option, but if there is some obvious (but not to me) fix, it would help me out by saving time.

Thanks

[marvin]

The VLAN that is not shutdown is the one used for the management IP address for the switch. Layer 2 switches like the 2900 allow you to have an IP address for management, and it can be in any VLAN. The VLANs are active, but only one can be used for management. If you want to route traffic between the VLANs, you would need an external router with a trunk to route between VLANs.

[Craig Norborg]

Yes, he's right. The 2900XL does not do Layer3 functions. Because of that, only 1 vlan interface can be active at a time, its considered the management interface. If you activate another one, it will deactivate the one that was active.

You probably want some sort of L3 switch like the 3550's or 3750's for what you're looking to do.

[glen.grant]

right only one vlan can have an ip address assigned to it for management , you should be able to have many vlans active on the box but you will not be able to talk between them without a router .