Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10 User Guide Release 10.5.0

Virtual LANs

VLANs segment a single flat L2 broadcast domain into multiple logical L2 networks. Each VLAN is uniquely identified by a VLAN ID or tag consisting of 12 bits in the Ethernet frame. VLAN IDs range from 1 to 4093 and provide a total of 4093 logical networks.

You can assign ports on a single physical device to one or more VLANs creating multiple logical instances on a single physical device. The virtual logical switches spanning across different physical devices emulate multiple logically segmented L2 networks on a single physical network.

Each VLAN has its own broadcast domain. The unicast, multicast, and broadcast network traffic from ports that belong to a VLAN forwards or floods to ports in the same VLAN only. Traffic between VLANs routes from one VLAN to another. You can also assign each VLAN an IP address to group all the ports within a single IP subnet.

In SmartFabric Services mode, you can configure up to a maximum of 256 uplink VLANs including the default VLAN given the limited hardware capability. For each of the uplink VLAN interface, the system creates an ACL entry to classify the traffic. This ACL entry maps the traffic from the VLAN to the corresponding traffic-class (TC) queue. If you create more than 256 VLANs, ACL table creation fails when the uplinks are created in the Fiber Channel Gateway or the Fiber Channel Direct Attach mode.

In SmartFabric mode, although you can use the CLI to create VLANs 1 to 4000 and 4021 to 4094, you cannot assign interfaces to them. For this reason, do not use the CLI to create VLANs in SmartFabric mode.