Cisco CCNA Study Guide - Router Alley

CCNA Study Guide v2.62 – Aaron Balchunas
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VLAN Port “Types”
There are two types of ports supported on a VLAN-enabled switch, access
ports and trunk ports.
An access port belongs to only one VLAN. Host devices, such as computers
and printers, plug into access ports. A host automatically becomes a member
of its access port’s VLAN. This is done transparently, and the host is usually
unaware of the VLAN infrastructure. By default, all switch ports are access
ports.
VLANs can span multiple switches. There are two methods of connecting
these VLANs together. The first requires creating “uplink” access ports
between all switches, for each VLAN. Obviously, in large switching and
VLAN environments, this quickly becomes unfeasible.
A better alternative is to use trunk ports. Trunk ports do not belong to a
single VLAN. Any or all VLANs can traverse trunk links to reach other
switches. Only Fast or Gigabit Ethernet ports can be used as trunk links.
The following diagram illustrates the advantage of using trunk ports, as
opposed to uplinking access ports:
VLAN A, B, C VLAN A, B, C
VLAN C
VLAN C
VLAN B
VLAN B
VLAN A
VLAN A
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