Advantages include:
VLANs increase performance by grouping users into logical networks and limiting broadcast traffic to users performing similar functions or within individual workgroups. As less traffic is needed to be routed the latency added by routers is reduced. Switched networks by nature increase performance over shared media devices, primarily by reducing the size of collision domains.
VLANs provide independence from the physical topology of the network by allowing physically diverse workgroups to be logically connected within a single broadcast domain.
VLANs have the ability to provide additional security not available in a shared media network environment. By nature, a switched network delivers frames only to the intended recipients, and broadcast frames only to other members of the VLAN. This allows the network administrator to segment users requiring access to sensitive information into separate VLANs from the rest of the general user community regardless of physical location. In addition, monitoring of a port with a traffic analyzer will only view the traffic associated with that particular port, making discreet monitoring of network traffic more difficult.
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