Hello all,

 

I have a few questions about the setup of (at least) 2 VLAN's with the use of 2 TL-SG108E switches.

 

Situation:

I am the sound engineer of a band and we are planning to buy a new digital mixing desk with a digital stage box. The stage box and the digital mixing desk are connected by a Cat6 Ethernet cable. The digital mixer is in a flight case at the front of house position and the digital stage box is next to the stage in a flight case. We also have some networking devices in both flight cases which need to be connected.

 

According to the supported method of the mixing system, the desk and the stage box need to be connected directly, because of the protocol of the audio signal transmission.

So that means I have to run 2 Cat6 cables from the stage to the front of house position. Not a big deal, but not desirable in our situation.

 

According to the Allen & Heath community, the brand of the desk and stage box, it is possible to run a "single cable" setup with the use of VLAN's.

 

So how would it look like:

Switch 1 is in the flight case next to the stage and switch 2 is in the flight case of the mixing desk. They will be connected with a Cat6 cable on port 1 on both.

The stage box is then connected to port 2 of switch 1 and the other network devices in that flight case on the other ports.

The desk is connected to port 2 of switch 2 and the other network devices in that flight case on the other ports.

 

From the Allen & Heath community I have had some information about the setup of the VLAN's and some global settings: 

"You must create a separate VLAN for the SQ’s IO port and the AR2412’s dSnake port across both switches.
Consult your switches’ documentations on how to do this.
Pay special attention to “tagged” and “untagged” settings:
The ports where SQ/AR are connected, are untagged and not member of any other VLAN.
The “trunk” ports carry the dSnake VLAN tagged.
No other ports may be assigned / member of the dSnake VLAN.
The switches must be configured such that no additional traffic is generated on the VLAN.
For example discovery protocols etc must be disabled for the VLAN.
The “backbone” connection between the switches must be Gigabit (or faster).
If the link between the switches has high load, you will get audio problems.
The switch ports to which SQ’s IO port and the AR2412 must be set to a fixed link speed of 100 MBit/s."

 

Now, I have had a brief look at the configuration manager of the SG108E, but it left me with a few questions.

 

Port 2 of switch 1 and port 2 of switch 2 need to have a separate VLAN and can not be member of any other VLAN.

Lets say I want the VLAN of the "audio" set to VLAN ID 20, so port 2 of both switches are only accessing VLAN ID 20, no other traffic may take place on this VLAN. The other ports can acces the default VLAN1, so I can run other network devices through the same Cat6 cable.

To connect the two switches together, I have to have a trunk connection between the two. I wish to use port 1 on both switches for the trunk connection.

 

With the info above, how do I setup the switches, ports and the trunk connection?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Kind regards,

Tinjo