How do I setup a VLan? - What equipment do I need?

Question

how do I setup 2 VLan networks?

What equipment do I need?

I have a phone and computer network, phones need to be routed to the Phone server, and computers routed to the network server.

The phone server has its own router for internet access and the network server also has its own router for another internet access.

Any help, or pointers would be great.

Answer 1

A good managed switch can do port based VLANs. I've done it on a second hand Cisco Catalyst 3548; any other enterprise level switch should have the same features. If you're network has multiple bit switches, you'll have to set up something between them to sync the VLAN information, Cisco uses VTP for this.

Answer 2

VLANs are already possible on Layer 2 switches. And it's a good idea to use separate VLANs, one for phones and another one for computers, because of

• Security - voice traffic should be protected against sniffing

• Quality of Service - voice quality should not suffer just because a computer starts huge downloads.

Here's a small example like it might be done for instance on a good old 2650 switch with, let's say, IOS 12.1.

Let's enable...

enable

Enter global configuration mode:

configuration terminal

If you add a VLAN to a switch, ensure that it's in server or transparent mode:

vtp mode transparent

Now create a VLAN:

vlan 2
name PC
exit

And the phone VLAN:

vlan 3
name VOIP
exit

Now you may assign VLANs to ports, for example:

configure terminal
interface range fastEthernet 0/16 - 22
switchport access vlan 5
exit
exit

Check your VLAN configuration:

show vlan

It should show:

5    VOIP       active    Fa0/16, Fa0/17, Fa0/18, Fa0/19
                          Fa0/20, Fa0/21, Fa0/22

On various switches and IOS versions it might be different, but this may give a start.

Answer 3

This doesn't really need to be separate VLANs. You can have the phone router and the network router on the same subnet, assuming you can disable DHCP for both of them. You just have a single DHCP server give the phone router as a gateway for phones and the network router as a gateway for computers.

With that said, all you need are switches which support VLANs. The switch will let you put each port on a (set of) VLANs, so you would set eg your phone ports on VLAN 1 and everything else on VLAN 2. This is best if you want well defined "phone" ports rather than letting phones be plugged in anywhere.

Answer 4

In order to use VLANs you'll need a LAYER 3 switch, that's a switch with routing capabilities. The vlan page at wikipedia has good information also.