The switch also supports brouter ports. A brouter port is a single-port VLAN that routes IP packets and bridges all nonroutable traffic. The difference between a brouter port and a standard IP protocol-based VLAN configured to route traffic is that the routing interface of the brouter port is not subject to the spanning tree state of the port. A brouter port can be in the blocking state for nonroutable traffic and still route IP traffic. This feature removes interruptions caused by Spanning Tree Protocol recalculations in routed traffic.
Because a brouter port is a single-port VLAN, each brouter port decreases the number of available VLANs by one and uses one VLAN ID.
The switch allows IP routing to be enabled on VLANs and brouter ports. For the maximum number of interfaces, see the Software scaling capabilities section of the VSP 8600 Release Notes.