VLANs and Trunking: Cert Guide Packet Tracer Labs ICND1 Chapter 11

Don’t just read about networking! Practice it! Many people practice by reviewing and doing the examples in a book. Today’s post details the Examples in the ICND1 100-105 Official Cert Guide Chapter 11 with matching Packet Tracer files. Enjoy!

Advice before You Begin

If you haven’t read about these new Cert Guide Packet Tracer Labs that you can use with the book, take a few minutes to read the first two posts about the feature, particularly the 2nd post, which acts as a guide to using the material in each per-chapter post (like this post.) The big idea: You can learn on your own by re-creating the examples in the book, but you may be more productive in your lab time if you get a running start by using the PT files we intend to create and leave here for your use.

What’s in This Post

Intro to the Book Chapter: A brief description of the topics in that chapter of the book.

Chapter Examples and .PKT File Reference: A section that lists the examples in the chapter, the .pkt files supplied, and reminders/notes about cases in which we don’t supply all three files for any one example.

Tips and Exceptions: When we build the files, we come across items that we think might confuse you when trying the examples with PT. We write those notes in this section!

Intro to the Book Chapter

Chapter 11 of the ICND1 100-105 Official Cert Guide, “Implementing VLANs”, sits in Part III of the book. So far, you should have learned a small amount about the breadth of LANs, WANs, IP routing, and TCP/UDP in the first part of the book. Part II covered the basics of LAN switching and configuring LAN switches.

Here in Chapter 11, you get to one of the most important topics for LANs, namely virtual LANs, including VLAN trunking with 802.1Q. The topics include how to define VLANs, configure a switch interface to be in a VLAN, and the combinations of how to configure switch ports to act as a VLAN trunk.

Chapter Examples and .PKT File Reference

Download this ZIP file to get all the .pkt files for this chapter:

This table tells you what files to expect in the ZIP, and which examples happen to use interface IDs that can be exactly replicated in PT:

Reminders: Purpose of Each Type of .PKT File

Topology File: The file contains all devices and cables in the associated figure along with any implied extra devices. The purpose: you never had to add a device or cable. It also contains a few configuration commands that do not affect the example, but help you navigate, for instance, it sets hostnames, passwords (always “cisco”), and interface descriptions.

Initial Config: The file contains everything in the Topology file, plus all configuration listed or implied by the words and figures leading up to the example. That is, it attempts to match the state of the network just before the first line of the example.

Ending Config: The file adds the configuration listed in the example to the Initial Config file – nothing more, nothing less.

Tips and Exceptions

This section lists our comments about using PT to do the examples. When we built the files, when we saw any behavior that we thought might make it more difficult to perform the example, we noted that fact so we could list it here, in case it might help you with the examples.

Examples 11-1, 11-2

While you can do the lab, you will see a few small differences between PT’s show vlan brief command output and the example. PT will list an incorrect status for VLANs 1002 – 1005 instead of the “/unsup” (meaning unsupported) status expected on real gear (as shown in the book example).

Example 11-3

If you look at Example 11-3 in the flow of the book, the example expands the topology used in the earlier examples in the chapter to add a 2nd LAN switch. For the purposes of this project, we treated Example 11-3 like a continuation of earlier examples, and did this:

• The Example 11-3 Topo file matches the figure w/ two switches
• The Init file uses SW1’s ending configuration from the previous example (11-2), plus the implied configuration per the figure on SW2.
• The example’s goal is to show what happens with all default settings for VLAN trunking, so note that the initial config file uses all default settings on the interfaces that connect the two switches.

Example 11-4

You can repeat this example with PT, but there are a few minor differences in PT’s command output compared with what a real Cisco Catalyst switch would show (as listed in the example.) In paticular, based on the ending configuration for the example:

• show interfaces trunk in PT shows the first list of VLANs as 1 – 1005 (stopping at the standard VLAN range), while real switches would show the 1 – 4094 range.
• show vlan id 2 in PT does not include trunk port g0/1 as a port in vlan 2, although it would be included on real gear as shown in the example.

Examples 11-6, 11-7

Just to emphasize the point that’s summarized in the table earlier in this post, both these examples list show commands, but no configuration. Use the ending config file of Example 11-5 as your starting point to try these examples.