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Wow, many of these comments are downright crazy.

I decided to jump back into IT back in 98, where I should have stayed focused on and gone into after highschool/college in the first place.

Even back then we were ripping out Bay Networks and Cat5000s using CatOS, and aside from the the BN's being unmanaged, we were using VLAN's, STP etc.

Now even 2 decades later and there are technical people responsible for networks who are mystified about IOS Layer 2 Vlans?

If I had to interview someone and they were more familiar with routing than switching, they'd be a no go probably for even an entry level position.

Switching may seem as relevent as Y2k nowadays, however its far faster than routing, and all of your User Access and Distribution networks absolutely rely on it.

Vlans minimize your broadcast domain, provide security segmentation, and make our jobs easier.... What can't Vlans do!

I'm primarily on Cisco kit, and the first thing I used to do when I was implementing or a config monkey was changing the the default native Vlan from 1 to something else, disable Vlan 1 and setting VTP Mode to Transparent.

You only need to work through a fire drill once where some idjit plugs a new switch onto the corporate network which happens to have VTP Mode set to Server, which then proceeds to upload its empty vlan db to all of your switches set to VP Mode Client.

Or because VLAN 1 is up/up he actually connects and starts populating his dept. lab with a DHCP server, router, etc and the Help Desk alerts your Dir to a network outage/incident occurring.

Very shocked to hear about SPB, totally missed that the past years. Checking on it, and now I know why, as it appears Cisco spurned it for TRILL which has died.

I know VSS works without STP, and C3850's and above allow both uplinks to be active with LACP, IIRC.