In the current innovative network, to cope with the increased require- ments of customers, there is a rapid increase in the development of dierent protocols and applications. With such increase in networking technology, the security constraints are becoming more and more severe, reducing the accessibility to the actual network for implementing new protocols. This scenario forced for an urgent need of a technology, which can help the re- searchers to implement their developed protocols in the network without inuencing the production trac. This need resulted in a concept called network isolation. This is achieved by VLAN or SDN technologies. In this study, we investigate the performance of VLAN and an API of SDN in the context of establishing dynamic link, in switching setup. For such a link creation, dynamic VLAN (dVLAN) is used in the former case and OpenFLow protocol is used in the later scenario. The main focus in this study is to compare the dynamic behavior of both the protocols in layer-2 context by measuring network level performance metrics of each protocol. Some of the features like, vendor independency and software independency is taken into account while measuring the performance metrics. In order to evaluate the performance, an experimental testbed is implemented. The network level performance metric called protocol setup time is measured. It is the time taken by each protocol to setup an active link between two end-hosts. A two-tire network architecture is implemented with the mentioned features. From the analytical and statistical results obtained, OpenFlow re- sulted in performing relatively better when compared to dynamic VLANs. By carefully examining the protocol setup time of OpenFlow against dVLAN, OpenFlow took less time when compared to dVLAN resulting in faster exe- cution in enabling connectivity. On the other hand, the analytical study on the two protocols reects the simplicity exhibited by dVLAN over Open- Flow.