SFE2010 - VLAN questions, IPs, Inter-VLAN routing?

[sap2k_lala]

Hello everybody,

I'm not really familiar with the cisco support sites yet, so I hope this is the right place to ask questions.

I'm using a SFE2010 in layer 3 mode right now, but not any important layer 3 features yet. Since I want to change that soon, I have a couple of questions relating VLANs et cetera. Since the switch is already needed for basic switching right now, I'm trying to keep the time for changes to a minimum...that's why simple testing is a little bit difficult and I prefer asking here first.

I basically want all traffic managed via VLAN. Since some clients are not 802.1q compatible, the SFE2010 has to do all the marking/trunking of the ports.

In the WEB Gui, I have serveral options relating VLAN (under Bridging in the Menu), for example Port to VLAN and VLAN to Port.

1. Question: I can't find the same options when connecting via SSH/Telnet/Serial - Why is that? Or where should I look?

2. Question: Do I need to put a "Port to VLAN" first and then add "VLAN to Port" for the trunking? What's the difference betweens these two?

3. The SFE2010 can have 2 IP Interfaces. Using VLANs I can give him several more, right?

4. Is there something like "Inter-VLAN-Routing"? I remember looking for something like that a while back, but without success.

Alright, that's it for now. Any help or suggestions are appreciated,

cheers

helge

[nimusell]

Hi Helge,

Thank you for participating in the Cisco Small Business Support Forum. My name is Nico Muselle from Cisco Sofia STAC.

Here are some answers to your questions

In the WEB Gui, I have serveral options relating VLAN (under Bridging in the Menu), for example Port to VLAN and VLAN to Port.

1. Question: I can't find the same options when connecting via SSH/Telnet/Serial - Why is that? Or where should I look?

The menu based console is quite limited in it's possibility for settings, adding ports to vlans is not possible there, however, there is also an option to go to command line there where you could configure all of it.

2.  Question: Do I need to put a "Port to VLAN" first and then add "VLAN to  Port" for the trunking? What's the difference betweens these two?

What you want to do is first configure the VLAN, then make sure the port is in trunk mode, then use VLAN to port

3. The SFE2010 can have 2 IP Interfaces. Using VLANs I can give him several more, right?

In layer 3 mode, you can assign both an IPv4 and IPv6 address to each VLAN

4. Is there something like "Inter-VLAN-Routing"? I remember looking for something like that a while back, but without success.

Again in layer 3 mode, inter-vlan routing is enabled automatically, you can see this by verifying the ip static routing where each VLAN will be added automatically once it has at least one client connected

Hope this answers your questions,

Best regards,

Nico Muselle
Sr. Network Engineer - CCNA

badge number: C274698

[sap2k_lala]

Hello Nico,

thanks for your reply.

I followed your instructions and the first steps went fine so far. I hope you don't mind asking some more questions:

Just to make sure I get it right...trunking means the SFE2010 adds the VLAN information, right? How does the switch recognize, what VLAN things are going to if a port is added to more than 1 VLAN? Depending on the source IP I guess?

I'm using the option authentication disabled for my VLAN right now. So the access to the VLAN is only managed by the port the client is connected to and his own IP, right?

Best regards,

Helge

[nimusell]

Hi Helge,

If you configure a port as a trunk, you can indeed assign it to multiple VLANs and the switch will add VLAN information to every packet. Based on this VLAN information, it will keep the traffic of a specific VLAN within that VLAN, except if you configure inter VLAN routing to enable traffic between multiple VLANs. VLAN information is contained at layer 2 (switching layer or MAC based layer) and does not have anything to do with IP addressing which happens at layer 3 of the network.

In fact you could have one layer 3 network or subnet, divided into multiple VLANs of Virtual LANs (hence the name). One of the most commonly made assumptions is that for every VLAN you need to create a separate subnet and network numbering, which in fact is not true, although doing this makes it seem more logical

To put a device in a specific VLAN, you can either define it on the device itself, either have an authentication protocol like Radius have the device assigned to a specific VLAN, based on for example MAC address or user credentials. For setting it on the device itself for example you can go to the advanced properties of your network adapter and see that  you can modify a setting there named "Priority and VLAN".

Hope this answers your questions ?

Best regards,

Nico Muselle

Sr. Network Engineer - CCNA