I just had to share this entertaining presentation with everyone.

http://gibsonnet.net/AIX/ibm/Journey_in_VLAN_world.pps

Or the PDF. It's not as interesting or fun, as the animations don't work but you get the idea. I'm sharing the PDF because it appears that you can open this file on Windows fine (in read-only mode) but on a Mac it prompts for a password without an option for opening in read-only. Shame.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/cgaix/resource/Journey_in_VLAN_world.pdf

It was written by Bernard Lemal. He works for IBM GTS Belgium in AIX support.

It’s a humorous look at the life of an IP packet and its journey in the world of VLANs, VLAN tagging and Virtual I/O.

Plenty of interesting and informative commentary along the way.

The part of the IP packet is portrayed by Bernard himself. Take a look at the presentation to see what I mean!

I wish I’d seen a presentation like this when I was first introduced to the concept of VLAN tagging, it might have answered several questions early on.

Enjoy!