Broadcom NetXtreme BCM57 Series, User Manual

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Using Broadcom Advanced Control Suite 4 NetXtreme User Guide
Broadcom
®
April 2017 • 2CS57XX-CDUM514-R Page 94
Managing VLANs
Overview
Virtual LANs (VLANs) allow you to split your physical LAN into logical parts, to create logical segmentation of
workgroups, and to enforce security policies for each logical segment. Each defined VLAN behaves as its own
separate network with its traffic and broadcasts isolated from the others, increasing bandwidth efficiency within
each logical group. Up to 64 VLANs (63 tagged and 1 untagged) can be defined for each Broadcom adapter on
your server, depending on the amount of memory available in your system.
VLANs can be added to a team to allow multiple VLANs with different VLAN IDs. A virtual adapter is created for
each VLAN added.
Although VLANs are commonly used to create individual broadcast domains and/or separate IP subnets, it is
sometimes useful for a server to have a presence on more than one VLAN simultaneously. Broadcom adapters
support multiple VLANs on a per-port or per-team basis, allowing very flexible network configurations.
Figure 2: Example of Servers Supporting Multiple VLANs with Tagging
Figure 2 shows an example network that uses VLANs. In this example network, the physical LAN consists of a
switch, two servers, and five clients. The LAN is logically organized into three different VLANs, each
representing a different IP subnet. The features of this network are described in
Table 5 :
Table 5: Example VLAN Network Topology
Component Description
VLAN #1 An IP subnet consisting of the Main Server, PC #3, and PC #5. This subnet
represents an engineering group.
VLAN #2 Includes the Main Server, PCs #1 and #2 via shared media segment, and PC #5.
This VLAN is a software development group.