Thanks for the comment! A couple of points…

Inter VLAN communication with SVIs is perhaps the easiest means to communicate between VLANs (In my mind). Configure the VLANs, add interfaces, and make sure the switch has ‘ip routing’ turned on. Clients who point to SVI as their default gateway can talk to any other VLAN since the switch sees the other interfaces as ‘directly connected’

In regards to the ‘General’ VLAN you reference. Sounds a lot like the native VLAN that Cisco has been using since the beginning. The native VLAN is sort of like its own little VLAN in many ways. Good network design means that you dont use the native VLAN but like any other VLAN, if it has a SVI it cant talk layer 3 to any other VLAN with an SVI if security allows it to do so.

Thanks! – Jon

Having Layer 3 for inter-VLAN communications involved, has always been a pain to configure and support.

With acquisition of Linksys, Cisco has introduced new VLAN mode on the switches: General. In this mode one switch port could have multiple untagged VLANs associated. And that would have a great consequences in creation of separated segments with a shared resources on a FLAT IP network – yes – all connected devices would have the same IP network address and network mask. The shared resources like servers, printers, Internet routers would be connected to such General VLAN ports and able to communicate within any VLANs defined as Untagged. And still, Access VLAN ports would connect end-user computers, which will be separated into a segments accordingly to their VLAN ids.

How would you comment that?

Thank you.

Sergey

P.S. It looks like Netgear devices have that functionality too.

Thanks!