Small Business Networking Goes Virtual

It is very easy to create VLANs. From the Web tool, there's a section in the left pane for VLAN. Click on Properties to open the VLAN Properties Page. All existing VLANs, the ID, name and type are listed in a table. There's also the option for deleting VLANs. Clicking on the button marked Add opens the Add VLAN Page where a number (for the ID) and a name (any text) is entered to create a new VLAN. This is done three times to create VLAN2, VLAN3, and VLAN4. VLAN1 comes in default.

Step 4: Assign the ports

It's not enough to just create the VLAN. The switch needs the port assignments that had been made in the previous step. The information is entered via the VLAN Membership Page, accessible under VLAN | Membership link. The page shows a table with VLAN information and a schematic of all the ports on the switch. The boxes representing the ports are either blank or marked with a T or U. The T indicates the port is tagged with egress packets and is a member of a VLAN. All packets forwarded by the interface are tagged with VLAN information. The U indicates the port is untagged with egress packets and is an untagged VLAN member. Packets forwarded by the interface are untagged. A blank box indicates the port is not a member of any VLAN.

A tagged egress port means packets for any VLAN is sent out on this port. A special data bit accompanies the packet indicating which VLAN it is meant for. An untagged egress port means packets for a VLAN gets sent out without this special tag data.

First, VLAN1 is configured. Under the schematic drawing on VLAN1's membership page, ports 8 to 36 were toggled to be untagged egress ports. Port 1 is toggled as a tagged egress port. Hitting the Apply button saves the port configuration settings.

To configure VLAN2, ports 2 to 7 are selected as untagged egress ports. Port 1 is a tagged egress port. VLAN3 is configured similarly, with ports 37 to 42 as untagged egress ports and port 1 as a tagged one. Finally, the VLAN4 has ports 43 to 48 as untagged and port 1 as tagged. As decided in the design, port 1 is toggled to a tagged egress port for all four VLANs.

Step 5: Configure the ports

Engineers configured the PVID settings for each port. Each port is assigned to a default VLAN that an incoming untagged packet would be forwarded. All ports must have a defined PVID; otherwise the default VLAN PVID, VLAN1, is used. Basically, any incoming packet on a port would go to the other ports in that VLAN. Since port 1 is included in all VLANs, they all have access to the packet.

The Interface PVID Settings Page is accessible from the VLAN menu, under Interface PVID Settings. In the resulting table, the PVID needs to be assigned for each port. As in the previous step, ports for VLAN2, VLAN1, VLAN3, and VLAN4 need to be assigned with the correct integer value associated with that VLAN.

NEXT: Adding security