Opinions on spanning a vlan across multiple switches

vanguard1 · ‎10-01-2008

Hi all. I will be setting up vlans on cisco ap's for my wireless network. Each floor will have 3 ssids. One will be used for guest internet access. I can create vlans specific for each floor, or use the same vlan across multiple switches. Is their a best practice for doing this. I have a collapsed core network design here. 3560's in the data closets, L2 uplinks back to the core. 6500 in the core where the vlans are setup.

Jon Marshall · ‎10-01-2008

There is nothing inherently wrong with spanning a vlan across floors. Generally speaking if you can it is better to try and keep vlans contained with the floor and the uplink but then again if you are not pruning or manually removing vlans from the uplinks where they are not needed you are not gaining that much.

Funnily enough this was one of the reasons we went with a L2 access-layer for a building in the last place i worked because we wanted the same SSID accessible from all floors but this was a while back and it may not be a constraint any more.

You may also want to consider cross-posting this into one of the wireless forums as they should be able to provide input from the wireless rather than the switch/vlan side of things.

Jon

vanguard1 · ‎10-01-2008

Thanks Jon. Appreciate the input.