VTP Filtering VLANs

[hassan.mehsen]

Hello 

Hope someone could help in my this issue,

We have network that consists of apartments with a switch for each apartment and a unique VLAN for each apartment.

We want to use the core switch as a VTP primary server. 

My question is that can we put a filter on each switch that can filters the VTP traffic to just update the apartment switches for just specific VLANs.

Like Apartment 3015 with a switch X must include just VLAN 3015 and  and voice vlan. and block all other

Can we do some filtering on the switch which let us just  receive by VTP the 3015 and voice VLAN and block all other VTP advertisement that includes other VLANs

Thank you...

[Jon Marshall]

I'm not aware of any way of doing this.

If you want control which vlans are on which switches then use VTP transparent and manually configure the vlans you want on each switch and use the "switchport trunk allowed vlan .." on the trunk links.

This is far more efficient in terms of vlan span and also how many STP instances each switch needs to run.

Jon

[hassan.mehsen]

Thank you Jhon,

Yeah this is applicable for a small network, but if you are talking like with 220 switches i think its painful

Thanks again.

[Jon Marshall]

You're right it is time consuming with that many switches.

But then again with that many switches that's a lot of STP instances per switch you have to run if you use VTP server/client unless you are using MST.

It's a tradeoff but I understand what you are saying.

Jon

[hassan.mehsen]

So you think the only way to solve such issue , to configure it manually?

[Jon Marshall]

Basically yes.

It is time consuming to set up but once it's done there shouldn't be a lot of work involved.

If you were going to be adding new vlans and these vlans needed to be on all the switches then that would an argument for using VTP server and client switches.

But it sounds like you only want specific vlans on specific switches in which case it is really just the initial setup that takes time to do.

Like I say it is really a tradeoff but if you had that many switches and each switch was using a different pair of vlans then using VTP server could mean some of your switches would hit the STP limit and couldn't run STP for every vlan.

Unless as I mentioned you are using MST.

Jon

[hassan.mehsen]

Yeah you are right 

Thank you

[Jon Marshall]

The alternative is to run VTP server and enable pruning which would significantly reduce the amount of traffic sent to each switch ie. only traffic for the vlans the switch was using would be sent.

This still doesn't overcome the fact that each switch has every vlan in it's vlan database though.

Jon