Adding Switch to Cisco Home Lab - Part 3

Assigning Switch Ports to VLANs

After configuring VLANs on Cisco switch, now we need to assign the switch ports to VLANs.

We need to assign which ports should be in which VLAN, remember VLAN = broadcast domain = subnet.
So before making your own VLANs, consider the IP addressing scheme and which computer should be in which broadcast domain or network.

Next step is to configure the trunk port to connect to the router and access port to connect the switch ports to our clients' PCs or other network devices.

The trunk port is needed to carry all VLANs or selected VLANs (you can decide which VLANs are allowed to cross the trunk link) in one port and the native VLAN is assigned to "tag" untagged frames with the ID of the native VLAN.
You should also configure trunk if you want to connect a switch to another switch, you have to configure trunk port on both switches.

For the access port, one access port can only be a member for 1 VLAN, anything plug in to the access port will be assign with the configured VLAN ID.

You need to remember though, the devices attaced to the switch ports don't know anything about VLAN, it is only something the switch knows.
Before a frames are sent to the clients, the VLANs tags are stripped from the frames.

In this example I configure the FastEthernet port 0/1 to be the trunk port that connects to the router.

C2950> enable
C2950# configure terminal
C2950 (config)# interface fa0/1
C2950 (config-if)# switchport mode trunk

At this point you already configured the port FastEthernet or fa 0/1 to be trunk port.
There are two encapsulation method for trunking, the ISL which is proprietary method from Cisco - only for Cisco devices and the 802.1Q or dot1q for short which is the multi-vendor encapsulation method.

Since the 2950 switches only support dot1q method you don't need to define it again but if your switch support both methods then you need to configure it using switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q or you can replace the dot1q with isl if you want to use ISL.

Next is to define the native VLAN and if you want to, you can define which VLANs are allowed to cross that trunk port:

C2950 (config-if)# switchport trunk native vlan 5
C2950 (config-if)# switchport trunk allowed vlan add 5, 10, 20, 30

You can add or remove vlans on the trunk port, by default the trunk will carry all VLANs.

Finished with the trunk port configuration, now we assign ports to the VLANs we created. You can assign the ports one by one like this:

C2950 (config)# interface fa0/2
C2950 (config-if)# switchport mode access
C2950 (config-if)# switchport access vlan 10

Or you can define a range of interfaces at once, say I want to configure port 0/2 to 0/8 as the access port for VLAN 10, then I just have to do this:

C2950 (config)# interface range fa0/2 - 8
C2950 (config-if-range)# switchport mode access
C2950 (config-if-range)# switchport access vlan 10

Do the same thing with the VLAN 20 - the home network VLAN:

C2950 (config)# interface range fa0/9 - 16
C2950 (config-if-range)# switchport mode access
C2950 (config-if-range)# switchport access vlan 20

Very handy command right?

One trick I can give you, if you want to configure some ports that are not in sequential order, like you want to configure port 2 to 5 and 10 to 15 and port 24, you can do it like this:

C2950 (config)# interface range fa0/1 - 5, fa0/1 - 15, fa0/24

There, you successfully created access ports for VLAN 10 and 20. For the VLAN 30 or the VLAN used for wireless network, I need to safe it for another time since configuring wireless network with Cisco devices takes some tricks.

Now we're done with the Cisco switch configuration, next thing to do is configuring the router to accept VLANs and be DHCP server for all the networks.