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 devices and have those changes automatically communicated to all the other devices in the network. Without VTP, you cannot send information about VLANs to other devices.
VTP is designed to work in an environment where updates are made on a single device and are sent through VTP to other devices in the domain. It does not work well in a situation where multiple updates to the VLAN database occur simultaneously on devices in the same domain, which would result in an inconsistency in the VLAN database.
You can enable or disable VTP per port by entering the [no] vtp interface configuration command. When you disable VTP on trunking ports, all VTP instances for that port are disabled. You cannot set VTP to off for the MST database and on for the VLAN database on the same port.
When you globally set VTP mode to off, it applies to all the trunking ports in the system. However, you can specify on or off on a per-VTP instance basis. For example, you can configure the device as a VTP server for the VLAN database but with VTP off for the MST database.
Because trunk ports send and receive VTP advertisements, you must ensure that at least one trunk port is configured on the device or device stack and that this trunk port is connected to the trunk port of another device. Otherwise, the device cannot receive any VTP advertisements.