Example IEEE 802.1ad Configuration
The following figure shows an example of the IEEE 802.1ad configuration.
In this example, a collocation service provides private channels for multiple clients. Although the same devices are used for all the clients, the VLANs ensure that each client receives its own Layer 2 broadcast domain, separate from the broadcast domains of other clients. For example, client 1 cannot ping client 5.
The clients at each end of a channel appear to each other to be directly connected and thus can be on the same subnet and use network services that require connection to the same subnet. In this example, client 1 is in subnet 192.168.1.0/24 and so is the device at the other end of client 1 channel.
Because each VLAN configured on the core devices is an aggregate of multiple client VLANs, the aggregated VLANs greatly increase the number of clients a core device can accommodate.
This example shows a single link between the core devices. However, you can use a trunk group to add link-level redundancy.