The switch supports wire-speed IP routing between VLANs. As shown in the following figure, VLAN 1 and VLAN 2 are on the same device, yet for traffic to flow from VLAN 1 to VLAN 2, the traffic must be routed.
When you configure routing on a VLAN, you assign an IP address to the VLAN, which acts as a virtual router interface address for the VLAN (a virtual router interface is not associated with a particular port). You can reach the VLAN IP address through the VLAN ports, and frames are routed from the VLAN through the gateway IP address. Routed traffic is forwarded to another VLAN within the device.
When Spanning Tree Protocol is enabled in a VLAN, the spanning tree convergence must be stable before the routing protocol begins. This requirement can lead to an additional delay in the IP traffic forwarding.
Because a port can belong to multiple VLANs (some of which are configured for routing on the device and some of which are not), a one-to-one correspondence no longer exists between the physical port and the router interface.
As with an IP address, virtual router interface addresses using Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) are also used for device management. For Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or Telnet management, you can use virtual router interface address to access the device as long as routing is enabled on the VLAN.