Switch Port Grouping

In some organisations, from time to time it is necessary to change the VLAN of a large number of ports at once.

For instance, many colleges and hotels run conferences. During these conferences, switch ports that are usually used by students or staff need to be reused for another purpose. To maintain security during this change of use, it is usually preferable to change the VLAN of these ports.

A new feature on the FireRack Management Server allows the administrator to create "port groups". The network administrator simply uses the web interface of the FMS to create a user-defined group of switch ports. These ports can then be reconfigured en masse. Each port can be a member of multiple groups.

Figure 1.

As you can see above, ports 1 to 4 are members of the student-1 port group. Ports 5 to 8 are members of the student-2port group. Ports 1-8 are also members of the conference-1 port group. At conference time the network administrator can assign all eight ports to a "Conference-1 VLAN". When the conference is over, he can perform two separate operations to move the student-1 and student-2 ports back into their appropriate VLANs.