VLAN Explanation please

Nikk92

Hi all, i'm starting out studying for my CCNA.

I have just bought my first Lab.

Using a single Cisco Catalyst 2900XL with no trunks or routers. I have been experimenting with creating vlans. I created a new VLAN named vlan 5 and added 4 ports to it. Configured the IP addresses and tried pinging the hosts but to no avail.

I did a Show IP Interface Brief and it said VLAN 5 is administrativley down.

Ok I was doing some research via google and I read that i can only have 1 management vlan at a time, so therfore, I thought I wouldn't be able to create more than one active vlan on this switch or so i thought.

So anyway, I decided to shutdown VLAN 1 , the default management vlan to make vlan 5 the management vlan. I did so, then did a sh ip int brief and it now says both Vlans are up and now I my vlans work?

Ok great, i`m happy that it works but can someone explain why they both went up after I shutdown vlan1?

thanks for your advise

Nick

dtlokee

You can have multiple VLANs but only one can have an IP address on the switch, the others are transparent. If you had a L3 switch (like a 3550,3560 etc.) you could assign an IP address to each VLAN you create. The IP address of the switch is only for management of the switch, telnet, ssh, syslog, tftp and so on. The users of the network don't need it, it's not the default gateway or anything.

Nikk92

Thanks for the heads up