VLAN Trunking Protocol
The basic goals of VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) are to manage all configured VLANs across a switched internetwork and to maintain consistency throughout that network. VTP allows you to add, delete, and rename VLANs—and information about those actions is then propagated to all other switches in the VTP domain.
Here’s a list of some of the cool features VTP has to offer:
- Consistent VLAN configuration across all switches in the network
- Accurate tracking and monitoring of VLANs
- Dynamic reporting of added VLANs to all switches in the VTP domain
- Adding VLANs using plug-and-play
Very nice, but before you can get VTP to manage your VLANs across the network, you have to create a VTP server (really, you don’t need to even do that since all switches default to VTP server mode, but just make sure you have a server). All servers that need to share VLAN information must use the same domain name, and a switch can be in only one domain at a time. So basically...
