TY - JOUR T1 - A survey of virtual LAN usage in campus networks JF - Communications Magazine, IEEE Y1 - 2011 A1 - Yu,Minlan A1 - Rexford,J. A1 - Sun,Xin A1 - Rao,Sanjay A1 - Feamster, Nick KW - academic department KW - campus network KW - educational computing KW - Educational institutions KW - Ethernet scalability KW - Local area networks KW - network policy support KW - university campus KW - virtual LAN usage KW - VLAN AB - VLANs are widely used in today's enterprise networks to improve Ethernet scalability and support network policies. However, manuals and textbooks offer very little information about how VLANs are actually used in practice. Through discussions with network administrators and analysis of configuration data, we describe how three university campuses and one academic department use VLANs to achieve a variety of goals. We argue that VLANs are ill-suited to some of these goals (e.g., VLANs are often used to realize access control policies, but constrain the types of policies that can be expressed). Furthermore, the use of VLANs leads to significant complexity in the configuration of network devices. VL - 49 SN - 0163-6804 CP - 7 M3 - 10.1109/MCOM.2011.5936161 ER -