[c-nsp] Cheapest Cisco desktop switch that supports Q-in-Q/802.1Q VLAN encapsulation/double-tagged VLANs/Stacked VLANs

[Frank Bulk - iName.com]

Thanks for explaining the semantical differences.  What I'm looking to do is
the termination -- wouldn't the ME3400 do the trick?

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: sthaug at nethelp.no [mailto:sthaug at nethelp.no] 
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 3:56 AM
To: frnkblk at iname.com
Cc: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Cheapest Cisco desktop switch that supports
Q-in-Q/802.1Q VLAN encapsulation/double-tagged VLANs/Stacked VLANs

> What is the cheapest Cisco desktop switch that supports Q-in-Q?  Is it the
> ME-3400G-2CS-A?  We prefer the "encapsulation dot1q x second-dot1q y"
> approach.

Your last sentence doesn't make sense here. 

"Q-in-Q" generally refers to *tunneling* one VLAN trunk through an L2
network by adding an extra VLAN tag in front of the existing VLAN tag.

"encapsulation dot1q x second-dot1q y" is used to *terminate* a dual
tagged VLAN connection (typically an IP termination). This is very
different from *tunneling*.

So - do you want tunneling or termination? I don't believe there are
any Cisco desktop switches which can IP terminate a dual tagged VLAN
connection. There are, of course, plenty of desktop switches which
will do 802.1Q tunneling.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no