Management VLAN

[chrisbanks00]

We are creating a management vlan which we plan on making all of our switches a part of. Should we be placing our uplink ports in this vlan or leave them in the subnet vlan they are currently apart of? We have trunking configured on all 90 switches so it seems as if it would work either way. We are not sure what the "best practice" is though. Thank you in advance for any help on this subject matter.

[andrew.butterworth]

Current design practises is NOT to use a network wide Management VLAN due to the STP topology that it creates. If you have a small network then it shouldn't be too much of a problem but will result in STP loops in the network that are generally undesirable.

Best practise is generally to have unique VLAN's per switch, terminating your Layer-2 on Distribution/Core switches and then routing (layer-3) from here on in. If you trunk a single management VLAN everywhere it means all links must be trunks and this introduces too many STP loops.

Have a search on CCO for HIERARCHICAL CAMPUS DESIGN, or Campus Design.

HTH

Andy