Hey everyone. I work in a data center, and I'm working on getting my CCNA. Now when I read articles on the idea of VLAN's it makes sense. Especially if you have multiple switches daisy chained in multiple locations. My two main questions though are that most of these examples use PC's as examples for using VLAN's. But in the environment I work in, we have clients who have 2 and 3u servers, with multiple hard drive bays in these vlans. I don't know what these machines are running, but what could they possibly need to communicate to each other for?

Even in regards to normal PC's like in the examples I read in the cisco book, what protocol or data is sent directly to another PC? If I'm using something like yahoo instant messenger, and I send a message to the person on the same VLAN, does that packet/frame ever leave the vlan? or is it send directly to the switch and the switch sends it to the receiver? Wouldn't something like that go to a Yahoo messaging server somewhere and then send back to the person sitting next to me?

I ask this because I can't think of information that is send directly from one computer to the next without it ever leaving a vlan. Except transfers files or something and the idea of separating broadcasts.

Hope this line of questioning makes sense! Thanks!