VTP

[qwertys21]

Please can anyone tell me which is better?

Using VTP on switches or

Configuring vlan manually on switches?

Bearing in mind we only have 6 switches.

Thank you

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Hi

There are pros and cons for both.

Using VTP means you only have to add the vlan to your VTP server switch and it is automatically propogated to each client switch. Hence you are less likely to forget to add it to a switch.

However if you want control over your setup you should go transparent. There is no danger of introducing a switch into your infrastructure and accidentally wiping out the vlan configuration. Also you only add the vlan to the switches that need it.

It comes down to convenience (VTP server/client) versus control (transparent).

Jon

[Rick Morris]

I agree with Jon.

It really is what you feel comfortable with. VTP is much easier to administer, even though you only have 6 switches, do you want to have to make changes to all 6 if needed.

VTP - you set up a domain

build the database

Set all other switches as clients and away you go. Any changes you make on the switch that is the VTP server and all the others are populated automatically.

[glen.grant]

In big installs I would say client/server is the way to go , if you only have a few then transparent is ok even though client/server would work also . We have one client/server setup of about 40-50 Catalyst 4006's and it has worked great for a number of years . Creat the vlan on the server and then just assign the vlans to the ports on the switch . We have to add the vlans to trunk also because we manually prune off the trunks because early on we found the spanning tree was driving the cpu about 30% higher than it should be due to the number of vlans in the domain.