vlans

The Cisco ESW 500 Series Switches for the SMB

Hello again folks! I wanted to talk a little bit about switching again. This time in the SMB! In the SMB space it has been historically hard to find good quality but cheap switching. Especially if you require POE switching for things such as VoIP or POE powered access points in your wireless network.

Well Cisco has a great solution for the SMB with their ESW 500 series line of switches. These switches are also from their Small Business Pro line. There are a variety of models to choose from including POE models. For those clients that just need basic switching with vlans and POE these are great switches to choose from.

Granted, Cisco has the 2960 switches with the Lan Lite images, but they aren’t at the same price point. The ESW 500 series are aggressively priced against competing brands.

-RP

Extended vlans in Cisco switches

For those of you venturing into switching for the first time, one of the things that can be hard to wrap your head around if you’re just a beginner is vlans. Vlans are great ways to make the management of your network a lot more organized, and are used everywhere in this world. You’re not going to be able to enter the switching world without running into them so it’s best to learn about them asap.

Now one of the things that can cause you troubles down the road is configuring vlans across many switches in large environments. This is made easier by the use of VTP (VLAN Trunking Protocol). You can use this to automatically configure vlans across many switches.

Unfortunately you might run into a problem when using extended vlans. If you use extended vlans and VTP version 2, you will find that you can’t use vlans all the way up to 4095. Instead what you need to do is use VTP version 3 which will enable you to use the entire range, or you can put your switch in VTP transparent mode to allow it to use extended vlans.