Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports
When I studied for my CCIE almost 15 years ago, I recall that I was fascinated by how different PDUs such as CDP, DTP, STP would have different encapsulations on a trunk depending on the configuration of it. What happens when you change the native VLAN? What happens if the native VLAN is not allowed on the trunk? What happens if you tag the native VLAN? There aren’t many resources describing this as most people don’t care for this level of detail, but there are situations where this is important. The goal of this post is to configure different protocols and see how they are encapsulated using different trunk configurations. You don’t need to consume this entire post, rather use it as a reference for different scenarios. Just be aware that some of this may be platform/OS specific.
The protocols we’ll cover for this post are:
- CDP.
- LLDP.
- DTP.
- PAgP.
- LACP.
- PVST+.
- RPVST+.
- MST.
The topology is going to be very simple, two switches connected by a single link:

These are IOSv-L2 devices:
SW1#show version Cisco IOS Software, vios_l2 Software (vios_l2-ADVENTERPRISEK9-M), Experimental Version 15.2(20200924:215240) [sweickge-sep24-2020-l2iol-release 135] Copyright (c) 1986-2020 by Cisco Systems, Inc. Compiled Tue 29-Sep-20 11:53 by sweickge Continue reading