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We're moving more workloads to the M4300 series of switches and wanted to revisit some conventions in our internal documentation.
In the early days you could only use what is now named "General" mode where you haveto define VLAN membership, tagging and PVID individually. For some time now similar to another vendor we can use "switchport mode access" for a client-facing port that only has 1 VLAN or we can use "switchport mode trunk" where by default all traffic is tagged, unless you define one VLAN as the native VLAN.
Going forward I can see that in some areas using "switchport mode access" could lead to a shorter and understandable config and I'm guessing what it considered recommended by now since the SW Admin Manual for the M4300 says about general mode "Ports conform to NETGEAR *legacy switch behavior* for switch ports." so is general mode to be considered "legacy" by now?
I inquired your concern to the higher tier of NETGEAR Support and got their feedback. According to them, General Mode is not legacy. It is just a different way of doing the configuration. Access Mode and Trunk Mode were added for those who were more familiar with Cisco and wished to configure it that way. They both will achieve the same results if you configure them correctly.
I'd be interested in hearing from the Netgear crew if possible since I've come the the (interim) conclusion that in general mode especially trunks end up to longer configs. For example:
The additional lines in general mode is due to the fact that ingressfilter is automatically enabled trunk mode and any that general mode always includes the default VLAN and that it has to be explicitely excluded - which doesn't seem the case in trunk (and in access mode)
switchport mode access also seems to end up with shorter configs to:
Of course the actual configs end up being larger since in my case I do set 'vlan acceptframe' and other things.
Still: If you save 2-3 lines per port config, this starts to add up in complete config file on a stack of switches, hence my initial question if there is an actual recommendation from Netgear's side.
I inquired your concern to the higher tier of NETGEAR Support and got their feedback. According to them, General Mode is not legacy. It is just a different way of doing the configuration. Access Mode and Trunk Mode were added for those who were more familiar with Cisco and wished to configure it that way. They both will achieve the same results if you configure them correctly.
Thanks for taking the time to check this internally, good to hear that both ways are still valid.
What makes general mode more verbose (hence harder to read) is that I have to enable ingress filtering explicitely if I want it (which I do prefer to be enabled), and the fact that VLAN 1 (as far as I understood) has to explicitely excluded if not used. I'm not specifically coming from a Cisco background, but these are some of the reasons as to why my personal preference goes to switchport mode access/trunk - as of now.
