A Local Area Network (LAN) is a collection of devices connected together in one physical location, such as a building, office, or home. A LAN can be small or large, ranging from a home network with one user to an enterprise network with thousands of users and devices in an office or school.
A LAN comprises cables, access points, switches, routers, and other components that enable devices to connect to internal servers, web servers, and other LANs via wide area networks.
The rise of virtualization has also fueled the development of virtual LANs, which enable network administrators to logically group network nodes and partition their networks without a need for major infrastructure changes.
For example, in an office with multiple departments, such as accounting, IT support, and administration, each department's computers could be logically connected to the same switch but segmented to behave as if they are separate.
