VLANs (very briefly) Explained

What are VLANs?

VLANS (Virtual LANs) provide the ability to create a logical group of devices into a single broadcast domain. You can create these logical groups based on a project team, job function or even applications. Devices that are configured to be on the same VLAN act as if they are in an independent network. Think of a VLAN as a separate network. Why might we want to use a VLAN? Some reasons we would use a VLAN are:

Improved security
Reduced Cost
Better Performance
Smaller Broadcast Domains
IT Efficiency
Management Efficiency

VLANs

Each VLAN is an independent network and only devices on the same VLAN would be able to communicate (unless we did some extra configuration using a router). The switch is configured to support each of these VLANs.

No VLANs

If we did not use VLANs we would have to have a lot more complex topology where each current VLAN would be its own LAN, require more switches and more cabling! This would also be a lot more complex to setup and maintain. We like to use VLANs to help simplifying our network topology's.

Why are we learning about VLANs?

We will soon be moving on to learning about type-1 hypervisors. When you setup a type-1 hypervisor a majority of the time you will have this running on a server on a business network. This network will probably also be configured to use VLANs, so we need to understand what a VLAN is due to interacting with them.

If you want to learn more about configuring network devices such as switches and routers I highly recommend taking ICS 273 and ICS 274.

If you want to learn more about VLANs you can download and look at this PDF.

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