Hi @tony3 that's correct, you could make those 3 VLANs on the MX, and then have a single physical cable connect to your switch or switch stack, and that would be an 802.1q trunk port, carrying all 3 VLANs. You can choose any default VLAN you like, the default will be VLAN 1, and the default management VLAN for the switches will also be VLAN 1, which you can also configure under Switch > Configure > Switch Settings. And yes, also correct, the switch port you're connecting to should also be a trunk port. By default when you first deploy a new switch, all switch ports will already be trunk ports with native VLAN 1 and all VLANs allowed. So out of the box, the trunk connection would work, and then you simply select which ports you want in which VLAN and assign them to those VLAN IDs as access ports. Yes, I'd say that's the preferred way. If done your original way, that will also work, the disadvantage being scalability, because you would have 3 physical ports on the MX configured as access ports with 3 physical connections from the MX to the switch, and those switch ports would also be access ports on their respective VLANs. That's all fine, and would also work for your deployment, but it obviously burns more physical ports, and doesn't scale (when you have a lot more VLANs). Also, depending on your use case, if the VLANs don't have different functions or reasons for existing, and you simply want a larger block of contiguous address space, perhaps you could also use a shorter subnet mask, like a /23 to allow 510 hosts or a /22 to allow just over a thousand hosts. Hope that helps!
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