VLANs with the Catalyst 2950

[josephnunham]

Hello,

I received a Catalyst 2950 24 port switch from a friend and am curious about the VLAN capabilities. I have looked online for a while and I am coming across mixed answers. Some say that the 2950 only supports one VLAN interface which is the one used for management while others say that it can support multiple ones. Some say it can't route inter-VLAN traffic and others say that you can if you create a trunk port . I want to create a VLAN in place of a subnet so I can have some computers on 192.168.1.x and servers on 10.0.0.x or whatever. I want them to be able to talk to one another but have requests for the services running on the servers (HTTP, for example) come in and hit the router at 192.168.1.x and forward it to the VLAN with the servers with IP addresses of 10.0.0.x.

Any guidance of how to do this, or if it is even possible, would greatly be appreciated.

Thank you.

[lgijssel]

Hi Joseph,

The 2950 is a layer2 switch. It supports 250 vlans locally in the range of 1 till 4095.

There is a bit more to tell about this but perhaps that would be too much detail with too little relation to the question.

See it like this: in practice you can have more vlan than there are ports on the switch.

The 2950 does not have layer3 routing capabilities though so you cannot use it to route between your vlans.

This implies that you can only establish connections between ports which are in the same vlan.

Defining a trunk does not alter this behavior, it is merely a way to transport multiple vlans over one interface but their traffic remains separated.

regards,

Leo

[Ganesh Hariharan · Accepted solution]

Hello,
I
received a Catalyst 2950 24 port switch from a friend and am curious
about the VLAN capabilities. I have looked online for a while and I am
coming across mixed answers. Some say that the 2950 only supports one
VLAN interface which is the one used for management while others say
that it can support multiple ones. Some say it can't route inter-VLAN
traffic and others say that you can if you create a trunk port .
I want to create a VLAN in place of a subnet so I can have some
computers on 192.168.1.x and servers on 10.0.0.x or whatever. I want
them to be able to talk to one another but have requests for the
services running on the servers (HTTP, for example) come in and hit the
router at 192.168.1.x and forward it to the VLAN with the servers with
IP addresses of 10.0.0.x. 
Any guidance of how to do this, or if it is even possible, would greatly be appreciated.
Thank you.

Hi,

Cisco 2950 is L2 switch it can support only one SVI interface for Managemnet purpose of the switch but can have multiple vlans configured for segmentation,In order to have multiple subnet needs to communicate through cisco 2950 you need to have L3 devices connected with 2950 with trunk port and SVI configured on L3 devices for different vlan subnet to communicate.With L3 device SVI as gateway for local vlan subnets configured.

Hope to Help !!

Ganesh.H

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[josephnunham]

Thank you for your answers Leo and Ganesh.