I finally gave in and stopped fighting VLAN tagging at the switch level

For years I insisted on keeping all my VLAN configs on the router side (you know, the old-school way) and refused to use switch-level tagging. Then last month at a job in Austin, a buddy showed me how his Meraki setup handled a 40-client office with zero broadcast storms after he flipped to access ports with proper tagging. I ran my own test on a spare SG350 and saw the latency drop by a good 12ms on cross-VLAN traffic. Has anyone else made the switch from router-based to switch-based VLANs and regretted it?

2 comments

2 Comments

gonzalez.vera11d ago

That 12ms drop is interesting but I don't buy it as a general rule - I've run router-on-a-stick setups in three different offices and never saw latency problems from it, only simpler troubleshooting when something broke.

lucas6311d ago

Yeah that part about "simpler troubleshooting" caught my eye. I think people miss that the real issue with router-on-a-stick isn't just latency but the fact you're fighting with VLAN spaghetti when you scale up. Once you go past like 10 VLANs the config gets messy and you start making those late night "just one more ACL" mistakes that break everything silently. The setup works totally fine for small offices but it doesn't age well when you add more subnets or voice VLANs later.