What type of ports carry multiple VLANs on a switch?

Trunk ports are designed specifically to carry traffic for multiple VLANs across a single physical link between switches or between a switch and a router. This capability is essential in environments where multiple VLANs need to be maintained for organizational efficiency, allowing for logical separation of network traffic while using the same physical infrastructure.

When a trunk port is configured, it can encapsulate the data frames from multiple VLANs using standards like IEEE 802.1Q. This encapsulation adds a VLAN tag to each frame, thereby allowing switches to differentiate which frame belongs to which VLAN as it traverses the network. This is fundamental in larger networks to ensure that devices on different VLANs can communicate with each other through a routing process without requiring separate physical connections for each VLAN.

In contrast, access ports are restricted to a single VLAN and do not carry traffic from multiple VLANs. Management ports typically serve specific management purposes and are not designed for carrying user data or multiple VLANs. Virtual ports, while potentially used in various software-defined networking environments, do not specifically denote the capacity to carry multiple VLANs in the same undefined way trunk ports do.