Prerequisites for VTP
Before you create VLANs, you must decide whether to use the VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) in your network. Using VTP, you can make configuration changes centrally on one or more switches and have those changes automatically communicated to all the other devices in the network. Without VTP, you cannot send information about VLANs to other switches.
VTP is designed to work in an environment where updates are made on a single switch and are sent through VTP to other switches in the domain. It does not work well in a situation where multiple updates to the VLAN database occur simultaneously on switches in the same domain, which would result in an inconsistency in the VLAN database.
The switch supports a total of 256 VLANs. If the switch is notified by VTP of a new VLAN and the switch is already using the maximum available hardware resources, it sends a message that there are not enough hardware resources available and shuts down the VLAN. The output of the show vlan user EXEC command shows the VLAN in a suspended state.
Because trunk ports send and receive VTP advertisements, you must ensure that at least one trunk port is configured on the switch and that this trunk port is connected to the trunk port of another switch. Otherwise, the switch cannot receive any VTP advertisements.