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University of South Florida Gets Around With VLANs
May 31, 1999

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By Kelly Jackson Higgins Have VLAN, will travel: During freshman orientation at the University of South Florida (USF), advisers from the Arts & Sciences department set up shop in USF's Special Events Center. When they plug into the campus backbone from there, they still ride on their "home" virtual LAN. "We simply configure the port that feeds the building [designated] to be part of the Arts & Sciences VLAN, and it is automatically trunked across the campus Gigabit Ethernet backbone," explains Ted Netterfield, associate director of academic computing/information technologies for USF, Tampa.

VLANs have become integral in the daily lives of USF students, faculty and staff. The university has more than 100 Layer 2 VLANs organized by department, so Engineering can claim its own LAN and servers within the campus backbone, for instance, and enjoy the corresponding performance and security. Without the VLANs, USF's technical staff would have had to physically extend an existing LAN across campus fiber to remote locations for events such as orientation and registration.

But there's a mobility issue: When USF VLAN users go mobile, access isn't automatic. The IT department needed to plan ahead for the Arts & Sciences advisers switching locations for freshman orientation, and when a professor plugs in a laptop at the library, he or she has to call IT reps to configure access to the home VLAN. "The whole mobility thing is just starting to bubble--we haven't seen a big demand for it yet," Netterfield says. "We want to go where the professor would plug in the jack and automatically [recognize] his or her VLAN."

USF's Cisco Systems Catalyst 5500 switches are trunked together, and a single port in each of the Cisco 5505 switches in the campus buildings is configured to a specific VLAN. A few desktop switches attached to the 5505s are configured to VLANs, but most are assigned to the same VLAN as the 5505 switch upstream from them.

The biggest hurdle for USF's VLAN environment has been desktop switches, which can't support the total number of VLANs. "Desktop switch vendors tell us they can support only 16 or 64 VLANs," says Joe Rogers, network administrator for USF, which has been awaiting VLAN software upgrades from its main switch supplier, Cisco. So thus far, USF has not been configuring VLAN ports to the desktop switch.

The university may expand its VLANs into the wide area. Rogers says USF has received requests to provide home VLAN access for a new Port Authority building--scheduled for downtown Tampa--that will house USF's business school and distance-learning group. USF will need to reconfigure its Classical IP-based ATM WAN to run LANE (LAN Emulation) so the VLANs can travel over ATM.

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