VLAN Trunking Protocol
Most networks will have more than one switch. As a network administrator you don’t really want to have to go around and manually configure the VLAN information on each of these switches especially in a large environment. the switches in your network need to be aware of what VLANs have been configured on them. VTP or VLAN Trunking Protocol allows the switches within your network to share VLAN information between them. VTP is very easy to configure I am going to outline the steps in this post.
The first thing we need to do is configure the VTP mode. There are three different modes available when configuring VTP
- Server – VLANs can be created deleted or modified VLAN configurations are stored in NVRAM
- Client – VLANs cant be created deleted or modified
- Transparent – VLANs can be created deleted or modified but VLAN information received from other switches within the network is ignored
In a large environment you should have two switches configured as VTP servers for redundancy. Start by logging into the switch and enter global configuration mode then change the VTP mode to Server as shown below (the default mode on a switch is server so this step might not be nessessary).
Switch(config)#vtp mode server
Now we need to configure the VTP domain by using the following command. Note that the domain name is case-sensitve.
Switch(config)#vtp domain ALTCONTROLIT
The next step is to configure a password for the VTP configuration this is also case-sensitive.
Switch(config)#vtp password PASSWORD
The next step is optional. VTP pruning reduces network bandwidth by reducing unnecessary flooded traffic.
Switch(config)#vtp pruning
The above will configure a VTP server, if you want to configure a VTP client you can use the steps below
Switch(config)#vtp mode client
