Multiple VLANs on One Access Port

[joshclarkson1]

Hello,

I work in an industrial environment. We have three 2960S switches that I am trying to enable for an additional access VLAN, which will strictly be a machine network (PLC's and industrial equipment). My hope is to be able to use our current infustructure for ease of access to this equipment. So far I've played around with changing the access VLAN on specific ports to the new VLAN for testing. I am able to ping across the portchannel between switches and I've enabled routing between our current subnet and this VLAN's subnet. The hope is to have the ability to plug in a machine network device in to an unmanaged switch anywhere in our network and have this communicate with the same port on one of the 2960S switches as our current VLAN. So far I've considered:

• Are subinterfaces the solution? Are they available with the 2960S?
  

• Should I consider replacing the 8 port unmanged switches with small 8 port managed Cisco switches? That way I can trunk down to these and assign ports as necessary. I would really hope to not purchase any additonal hardware.
  

• Also, I have considered running additonal cabling as a worst case scenario.
  

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

Josh

[glen.grant]

  Need more information.  Where is the routing being done currently for your setup and how are the 2960's hooked into the routing environment ?

[devils_advocate]

As long as the switches you are plugging the end user devices into are Vlan capable then you should be fine.

They don't have to be Cisco switches, they just have to be capable of creating additional Vlans.

If you picked Vlan 2 for example as your new Vlan then any switches which need hosts in this Vlan will need it provisioned and you would need either a trunk or access port to the switches. If they are Vlan capable switches, I would use a trunk anyway.