It244 Vlan Plan

VLAN Plan

The complexity of corporate networks has increased dramatically in recent years and so has the need to design and maintain a logical layout for the networks. Let’s say you have a local company that needs to increase the size of their sales staff but physically they need to locate the new personnel on a different floor than the current sales team members. The network administrator will be able to add the new sales personnel to the VLAN (virtual local area network) in their new location and still maintain a logical network organization. These new sales people will have the appropriate accesses to services and maintains the data security.

     To a network administrator the use of VLAN technology provides many benefits. “In a VLAN, member hosts can communicate as if they were attached to the same wire, when in fact they can be located

on any number of physical LANs.” (Regan, 2004) To avoid security issues with both broadcast and multicast packets getting where they should not be, a VLAN ensures that only computers on the same VLAN will receive the broadcast. Using a VLAN helps avoid unnecessary network traffic that would be created by adding users from different physical locations and allowing workgroups to determine services and security. Should the network administrator need to move a member from one VLAN to another, this would be done via software eliminating the need to physically move devices and wires.

     Per this assignment, the company network is divided into four logical groups. These groups are operations, marketing, engineering, and the call center. With the expansion of the company there comes the need to move personnel to different physical locations. Since the network administrator has laid out the network in four broadcast domains, the network should not be flooded with traffic and the bandwidth should not be overly consumed. Security is greatly increased just by keeping broadcast packets on the VLAN for which they were...