Week 7 - BSIT220 - Simplifying VLANs (for myself)

I wanted to use this week's blog post really for me, but for anyone reading as well. The book explained VLANs and a few facets of it, but I'm still struggling to get my head around every concept.

The virtual local area network (VLAN) is a group of connected devices offering all the capabilities typically associated with a local area network (LAN), but with a few differences. VLAN devices don't have to be on the same network or physically connected to operate. Since the device connections are created logically, the connections are not impacted by the location of each device.

There are two types of VLAN, Port-based and Tagged:

- In a port-based, there is a single physical switch that is divided into multiple logical switches which can be configured to allow only certain devices to communicate with others. There will need to be one cable connected to the physical switch per VLAN. Port-based is considered a nightmare when it comes to wiring.

- In tagged, multiple VLANs can be used through a single switch port. Tags that contain the respective identifiers that indicate the VLAN to which the frame belongs are attached to the individual Ethernet frames as they exit the port. The connection can be accomplished using one cable connection from a trunk port.

The advantages to using VLAN as compared to just the normal LAN are that if a user on the network moves, the physical network doesn't need to be changed, and VLAN has improved performance because of this. VLAN has increased security because users are divided into distinct groups, any attack is limited to the VLAN where the attack originated and all other VLANs are kept safe.