Networking / AV-IT
VLAN — Virtual Local Area Network
01 — Definition
A logical partition of a physical network that isolates traffic as if it lived on separate physical switches. In AV it is used to fence off audio (Dante/AES67), video (NDI), lighting (sACN/Art-Net), control and guest traffic, so that one domain overflowing no longer drowns the others. It takes a managed switch — impossible on an unmanaged one.
02 — In the field
Run Dante and NDI on separate VLANs, even on a single physical switch. Without that separation, an NDI High Bandwidth burst can saturate the switch CPU and hand you Dante dropouts. The switch may look in perfect health: the bottleneck is the CPU processing path.