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CCNP SWITCH Exam Tutorial:

Static VLANs

By Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933

When you studied for your CCNA exam, you learned how to place ports into a VLAN and what the purpose of VLANs was, but you were not introduced to the second type of VLANs.

Hey, you had enough to learn! :)

To pass the CCNP SWITCH 642-813 exam, you must know the details of both static and dynamic VLANs. In this tutorial, we'll take a look at static VLANs, and then we'll take on the basics of and reasoning behind dynamic VLANs.

Host devices connected to a port belonging to one VLAN will receive broadcasts and multicasts only if they were originated by another host in that same VLAN. The drawback is that without the help of a Layer 3 switch or a router, inter-VLAN communication cannot occur.

The actual configuration of a static VLAN is simple enough. In this example, by placing switch ports 0/1 and 0/2 into VLAN 12, the only broadcasts and multicasts hosts connected to those ports will receive are the ones transmitted by other hosts in VLAN 12.

SW1(config)#int fast 0/1

SW1(config-if)#switchport mode access

SW1(config-if)#switchport access vlan 12

% Access VLAN does not exist. Creating vlan 12

SW1(config-if)#int fast 0/2

SW1(config-if)#switchport mode access

SW1(config-if)#switchport access vlan 12

One of the many things I love about Cisco switches and routers is that if you have forgotten to do something, the Cisco device is generally going to remind you or in this case actually do it for you. I placed port 0/1 into a VLAN that did not yet exist, so the switch created it for me!

There are two commands needed to place a port into a VLAN. By default, these ports are running in dynamic desirable trunking mode, meaning that the port is actively attempting to form a trunk with a remote switch in order to send traffic between the two switches. The problem is that a trunk port belongs to all VLANs by default, and we want to put this port into a single VLAN only.

To do so, we run the switchport mode access command to make the port an access port, and access ports belong to one and only one VLAN. After doing that, we placed the port into VLAN 12 with the switchport access vlan 12 command. Running the switchport mode access command effectively turns trunking off on that port.

The hosts are unaware of VLANs; they simply assume the VLAN membership of the port they're connected to.

But that's not quite the case with dynamic VLANs, which we'll examine in the next part of this CCNP SWITCH exam tutorial...

... and just follow this next set of links to watch a full hour of any of my CCNP Video Boot Camp DVDs at a very reasonable price - free!

CCNP SWITCH DVD

CCNP TSHOOT DVD

CCNP ROUTE DVD

CCNP Video Boot Camp Bundle (50 hours of training!)

Here's a complete course outline for each CCNP DVD -- click on the first two lessons in any of the courses to watch for free!

" The best money I have spent on CCNP training material!"

-- Rob Pethick, CCNP

To your success,

Chris Bryant