PORTS & VLAN

What Is a Port ?

In computer networking, the term port can refer to either physical or virtual connection points.

When considering computer networks, there are two kinds of port that we deal with - Physical Ports and Logical Ports. 

Physical Ports

Physical network ports allow connecting cables to computers, routers, modems and other peripheral devices.

Virtual Ports

Virtual ports are an essential component of Internet Protocol (IP) networking. These ports allow software applications to share hardware resources without interfering with each other. Computers and routers automatically manage network traffic traveling via their virtual ports.  

In IP networking, these virtual ports are numbered 0 through 65535.

What is VLAN?

VLAN stands for Virtual LAN or Virtual Local Area Network.

In order to understand the concept of VLAN let us look at the analogy of hard disk partitioning. We partition hard disks on a computer into several logical partitions. The main purpose is to organize the disk space as well as to ensure that corruption/exhaustion of one logical partition does not impact another partition.

Similarly in L2/Ethernet networks, VLAN give us the capability to partition a L2/Ethernet into multiple logical L2/Ethernet networks. This allows us to ensure that traffic from one VLAN does not mix with traffic from another VLAN.

Advantages Of VLAN :

• The VLAN can categorize many broadcast domains into number of logical subnets.
• The network needs to configure a port into the suitable VLAN in order to achieve change, add or move.
• In the VLAN a group of users with the demand of high security can be included so that the external users out the VLAN cannot interact with them.
• When it comes to logical classfication of users in terms of function, we can consider VLAN as independent from their geographic or  physical locations.
• Even the security of network can be enhanced by VLAN.
• The number of broadcast domains are increased with VLANs while the size decreases.