VLANs & Trunking for CCNP Routing & Switching 300-115 SWITCH

Introduction to CCNP SWITCH
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ben Piper, and this is VLANs and Trunking for CCNP Routing & Switching 300-115 SWITCH. This is the first course in a four course series covering all of the topics you need to know for the CCNP SWITCH exam, exam number 300-115. As you know, there are three exams you need to pass to get your CCNP Routing and Switching certification. Those are CCNP SWITCH 300-115, ROUTE 300-101, and TSHOOT 300-135. Now, it does not matter whether you take the SWITCH exam first or the ROUTE exam first, but you absolutely do want to take both the ROUTE and SWITCH exams before taking the Troubleshooting exam, that TSHOOT exam. That's because the TSHOOT exam requires skills from both the ROUTE and SWITCH exams. You want to get the ROUTE and SWITCH exams out of the way first, and then you'll really want to focus your efforts on the TSHOOT exam, which I think is the most challenging exam out of all of them. Now, of course, before you take any of those exams, you should already have your CCNA Routing and Switching certification. If you're still working on your CCNA, by all means feel free to watch this course, but just understand that I'm assuming you already have that CCNA level knowledge.

Manual VLAN Trunking
This module is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to spend a lot of time on the command line, and I think you're really going to be even more excited about the CCNP SWITCH exam by the time you're done. Let's get started. VLAN trunking is, as you already know, a way for switches to pass traffic for multiple VLANs across a single link. The point of this is to avoid having to separate access ports on each switch for each VLAN. This isn't a big deal with just a couple of VLANs, but if you have hundreds of VLANs, trunking is a necessity. There are three things that need to be in place for a trunk to work between switches. First, both switches must agree that they're going to form a trunk; second, both must agree on the encapsulation type, how they're going to communicate which frames belong to which VLANs; and third, both switches must have the VLANs configured that they want to pass traffic for. So let's start with that first step.