VTP is a Cisco proprietary protocol used in switching environment to reduce the administrative overhead of managing VLANs configuration.Lets explore how VTP can reduce VLAN management tasks by the following example:
Assuming that you have only three switches in your network and you need to configure 3 VLANs with each switch having members in each VLAN.
without VTP: you need to configure the three VLANs with all parameters on each of the three switches.(i.e. tripling the configuration tasks)
with VTP: you need to configure all VLANs with all parameters only once on one of the switches and all these information will be propagated throughout the domain.
VTP operation logic:
1- VTP mode must be configured on each switch to be one of the following.
- Server – In this mode you can add, delete and modify VLANs. You can also set other configuration options.
- Client – you cannot create, change, or delete VLANs on the local device. Switches in this mode will sychronize its VLAN configuration based on received messages.
- Transparent – A VTP transparent switch will not advertise its VLAN configuration and does not synchronize its VLAN configuration based on received messages. VLANS can be created, changed or deleted when in transparent mode. In VTP version 2, transparent switches do forward VTP messages that they receive out their trunk ports.
vtp mode [server | client | transparent] command is used in the global configuration mode to set the VTP mode.
2- VTP domain must match on all switches participating in the same domain. The switch will only accept advertisement messages from the same domain.
vtp domain [name] command is used to set the VTP domain on the switch.
3- VTP password must match on all switches in the same domain if authentication is used.
vtp password [password] command is used to enable password authentication in the VTP domain.
4- VTP messages propagate only over trunk links, so at least one trunk must be up between two switches.
5- Start making all creation, modification and deletion of VLANs on one of the switches in the server mode.
Known issues:
- VTP version must match within the same domain.
- Revision number must be reset or at least ensure it is lower than the current revision number in the domain before inserting a new switch.
Author: Wael Osama
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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