I have worked in a big network which used them but I never got to understand what they did fully before I left that job.

Is this what they are and do.I couldn't really find any good data on them so I'm just guessing. Please correct me if I'm wrong:

They act as a central management switch are based in your data center/server room etc. Then off these run swicthes to your floors which connect your users. The core switch runs as a VLAN Membership Policy Server (VMPS). It uses a different operating system than a IOS based switch. On it you set up a particular Vlan, and assign it an IP subnet range. The vlan database on the core holds the mapping of mac addresses to vlan assignment. So when you add a dynamic port to a vlan on a floor switch. The computer's MAC address is learned by the core switch and it is mapped to a particular Vlan.

So if the above is correct no IOS switch can act as a central vlan repository. An IOS switch can only have a management IP which you telnet into, it can't have an IP subnet representing a particular Vlan, but it can have computers running from it who reside in different vlan subnets.

Last edited by nero64 on 03-14-05 at 06:44 AM

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