Managing VLANs

Today, Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are very common in many companies. By configuring them, network administrators usually separate physical networks into different logical networks for security reasons.

XenServer supports VLANs offering you the possibility to separate the network traffic related to the virtual machines from the traffic dedicated to management interfaces, storage, and XenServer communications. The protocol most commonly used today in configuring VLANs is IEEE 802.1Q. Each network frame contains a tag identifier used to distinguish the traffic belonging to a specific VLAN. Commonly, we refer to traffic belonging to a VLAN with the term tagged as opposed to the term untagged, which is used for referring to network traffic not belonging to a VLAN.

VLAN configuration is usually made on the network switches. The network administrator can configure a switch's port as an access port or as a trunk port.

In the access mode, the switch ports are configured with...