Any 1U - 2U Ethernet switches that can handle 4K VLANs?

Mon Jan 26 17:08:43 UTC 2004

> > 1) Cisco ISL is much better than urgly 802.1q - first of all,  it was
> > designed many years before 802.1q. I am not even talking abiout those
> > idiots, who designed 802.1q as a _spanning tree on the trunk level_, 
> > which
> > made many configurations (which we used with ISL ain 199x years) 
> > impossble,
> > and caused vendors to extend 802.1q.
> 
> Is it April 1st? ISL changes the size of packets, does it not? So know 
> you have to deal with MTU issues. What happens when I want the biggest 
> MTU possible? I know it is not much a difference in size, but for some 
> people, size does matter.
> 
> I am quite happy with dot1q. My gripe is with poor spanning-tree 
> implementations. I don't want a single spanning-tree for every vlan on 
> a trunk... I like standards, but I am happy with Rapid-PVST. Just my 
> feelings about the issue. I would never deploy ISL unless I had 
> something like a 1900 that did not do dot1q

Amen. At my previous employer, we got rid of ISL on almost all trunks.
I wouldn't dream of going back. The only thing I don't really like about
802.1q compared to ISL is the idea of "native" or "default" VLAN. I want
links to be either access (untagged) or trunk (*all* packets tagged).
Fortunately, reasonably new Cisco switches let me enforce that with
"vlan dot1q tag native".

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no