Cabletron Systems SmartSTACK ELS10-27TX Supplement Manual - Chapter 5

5-1

CHAPTER 5

CONFIGURING WORKGROUPS USING LCM

5.1 OVERVIEW

Workgroups are a proprietary form that was developed prior to the IEEE standard 

being available. Workgroups are only supported in the 802.1D mode. The 

ELS10-27TX supports up to eight user defined Workgroups, with limited support 

for overlapping Workgroups.

The goal of Workgroups was to isolate broadcast and multicast traffic to within 

the Workgroup. In some cases unicast traffic will also be isolated. Due to the fact 

that a typical unicast address is obtained by first issuing an ARP packet (which is 

a broadcast, and the broadcast packet will not be forwarded outside of the 

Workgroup), the unicast address will not be learned outside of the Workgroup. 

The end result is that host or servers will not be able to communicate with other 

hosts or servers outside of their Workgroup.

Unlike the IEEE standard VLANs which spans switches, Workgroups only deal 

with filtering and forwarding of packets within the single switch. When packets 

are received on a port, the packet will be identified with a single Workgroup. The 

packet will then be forwarded or filtered based on that single Workgroup 

marking. When a packet leaves the switch, the packet will appear just as it did 

when it was received on the inbound port.