Colorless Ports

Within a campus network with a few thousand switch access ports and numerous intermediate distribution frames (IDFs), network admins must put in effort to assign VLAN IDs to the devices. It is also difficult to maintain switch port to VLAN mapping, and a significant configuration effort to manage thousands of lines of configurations on the switches is required.

With colorless ports, all the switches would have similar configuration with IP, credentials, authentication, VLANs, and uplinks. All access ports need only a few lines of configuration common for all ports. No admin intervention is needed to assign a VLAN to a user, since the user is automatically assigned a reserved VLAN ID.

The benefits of colorless ports are:
  • Simplified user experience

  • Increased visibility. It is easy to see what is on the network.

  • Increased security. The network correctly applies the correct policy to a device.

  • Simplified switch configuration. All access ports are configured the same.

For more details on the colorless ports, see User Roles in the Access Security Guide for your switch.