Netgear GSM7212P GSM5212P/GSM7212P/GSM7212F/GSM7224P User Manual - Page 96

3. Configuring Switching Information 3 Use the features in the Switching tab to define Layer 2 features. The Switching tab contains links to the following features: • VLANs on page 96 • Spanning Tree Protocol on page 112 • Multicast on page 127 • MVR Configuration on page 147 • Address Table on page 152 • Ports on page 158 • Link Aggregation Groups on page 161 VLANs Adding Virtual LAN (VLAN) support to a Layer 2 switch offers some of the benefits of both bridging and routing. Like a bridge, a VLAN switch forwards traffic based on the Layer 2 header, which is fast, and like a router, it partitions the network into logical segments, which provides better administration, security and management of multicast traffic. By default, all ports on the switch are in the same broadcast domain. VLANs electronically separate ports on the same switch into separate broadcast domains so that broadcast packets are not sent to all the ports on a single switch. When you use a VLAN, users can be grouped by logical function instead of physical location. Each VLAN in a network has an associated VLAN ID, which appears in the IEEE 802.1Q tag in the Layer 2 header of packets transmitted on a VLAN. An end station may omit the tag, or the VLAN portion of the tag, in which case the first switch port to receive the packet may either reject it or insert a tag using its default VLAN ID. A given port may handle traffic for more than one VLAN, but it can only support one default VLAN ID. From the VLAN link, you can access the following pages: • Basic on page 97 • Advanced on page 99 96