Okay, I’ve been watching lots of YouTube videos about switches and I’ve just made myself more confused. Managed versus unmanaged seems to be having a GUI versus not having a GUI, but why would anyone want a GUI on a switch? Shouldn’t your router do that? Also, a switch is like a tube station for local traffic, essentially an extension lead, so why do some have fans?
So everything I thought was a LAN up until now is really just a VLAN?
You’ve run up against the first thing that seems to really confuse people when they begin learning about networking.
What you thought of as a LAN is a LAN. A VLAN is a Virtual LAN. It’s the same concept but virtualized, allowing more than one LAN on hardware that is just physically a single LAN.
When most people are talking about setting up VLANs they are usually describing the creation of a separate layer 3 subnet and the creation of a VLAN ID that gets tagged to all packets that get sent on that separate subnet. This allows for both layer 2 and 3 separation of the virtual lans on a single physical network.
Conceptually it’s very similar to VM’s running on a single server.
So what differentiates a virtual LAN from a real LAN? Like how can I tell which one my ISP had set-up?