Furthermore, they can be stackable just like a Layer 2 Switch. They can have 24 or 48 ethernet ports and some SFP-ready ports. From a physical perspective, multilayer switches are identical to traditional switches. The Multilayer Switch What is a Multilayer switch?Ī multilayer switch, known also as Layer 3 Switch, is a hybrid device combining a switch with a router. Our ten PCs are inside VLAN 10, 20, and 35. We kept the client configuration identical, as well as the VLAN Configuration. The addressing plan comes from the previous article. Once these concepts are clear, you will be able to perform this exercise easily.
In fact, we will quickly present what a Multilayer switch is, and how it works. We prepared already everything else, such as trunks configuration.īefore we can dive into this configuration, however, we can benefit from a little bit of theory. Furthermore, we need to configure the multilayer switch only for Inter-VLAN routing. All other devices, including the switches, are ready. Specifically, we are going to work on the Multilayer switch only. The Requirementsįor this lab, we are going to focus only on Inter-VLAN Routing. We conveniently named those VLANs red, blue, and green as you may know from the previous article. Higher end switches often have high bandwidth ports (10 gigabit or higher) that may be used to connect to other switches to improvement performance as well.In this topology, we are going to work on the big multilayer switch in the middle.Īs you can see from the picture, we still have 10 different PCs, distributed in three VLANs. Layer 3 switches can process data packets faster than routers since data is transferred at wire speed. A general recommendation is to make use of a Layer 3 switch that can route traffic between other switches without needing a router for inter-VLAN communication. The router on a stick configuration could actually become a bottleneck if you have high bandwidth requirements between VLANs since the network traffic must be sent to the router on a single ethernet interface in order to forward the data to the other VLANs on the same switch.įor example, if you are using a 1 gigabit switch and a router with 1 gigabit ports but are pushing more than 1 gigabit of data between your various network devices, you will encounter a bottleneck with this network configuration. After all, one purpose of creating VLAN is to help facilitate improved security in the network.įor a home network, this configuration is more than adequate to provide separate VLAN networks especially if you do not need to have a large amount of communication between the VLANs. This traffic is usually controlled via firewall rules to restrict certain traffic. The router is responsible for inter-VLAN routing so that network traffic may flow from one VLAN to another.
The network switch may be configured to have two or more VLANs to logically partition the network. A “router on a stick” (aka “one-armed router”) is a network configuration in which a single network switch is connected to a single LAN interface on a router.
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