Are Cisco access ports basically the same thing as a port on an unmanaged switch?

Question

The title should say it all..I'm trying to learn more about VLANs, tagging/trunking, etc.

Why downvote? I'm trying to learn isn't that what this site is for? — cjones26, May 18 '12 at 20:52
Note for anyone finding this closed question: Not quite. Cisco switches are pretty chatty with CDP and STP enabled (default). Moreover STP will prevent the port from going up quickly (<30s) and that can cause issue w/ PXE (dhcp/tftp timeout). — petrus, Sep 17 '12 at 20:46

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 17 '12 at 23:08

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Access ports only receive packets for a single VLAN and the switch can encapsulate received packets and put them in that VLAN. So access ports are not much like unmanaged ports.

answered May 17 '12 at 23:08

David Schwartz

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 17 '12 at 23:48

Access ports belonging to the same VLAN behave like they are on a self-contained switch. That's the very definition of "VLAN".

Consider this scenario:

A switch has 24 ports
Ports 1-12 are configured in access mode and assigned to VLAN 10
Ports 13-24 are configured in access mode and assigned to VLAN 20

From the point of view of connected devices, this behaves exactly as if there were 2 totally unrelated 12-ports switches.

Are Cisco access ports basically the same thing as a port on an unmanaged switch?

2 Answers2