VOIP setup in work

Deirdra

Hi,

I've had a look through this forum & it all seems to be related to voip setup at home. We're looking at putting a new VOIP phone system in work & I would really like to get some information off people who are already using a VOIP phone system in their work place. The plan is to run gigabit connections to the desk & have the pcs hanging off the ip phones.

As both the phone & pc will be connecting back to the network switch via the one port, how does it differentiate the traffic? Will this port be assigned to a voice vlan & how does this then affect the data traffic from the pc?

I'm sure I'm going to have a tonne more questions but this is a start.

Hope someone out there has experience of this.

Thanks,
Deirdre

roryq

Hey I can tell you the way our system is setup in our office.. We have our IP Phones on a vlan which runs on a number of Cisco switches. When it goes back to the router the QOS kicks in to tell in what Broadband to go out on.

We have a dedicated broadband line that runs our Voip traffic. It is supplied by imagine..

Deirdra

Thanks for the reply roryq

So do your ip phones & computers each have individual connections back to the LAN?

We don't have enough switch ports so we're going to connect our ip phones to the network switch & then our pcs will connect to the ip phones to get on the network. I'm just not sure how this will work......

roryq

No we have Polycom IP650 which have dual lan ports similar to the Cisco sets.

So we have a single connection back to the lan from each point. These are routed back to cisco switches. The SIP traffic(phone) goes on the vlan and is then routed via QOS out to the Provider.

The pc traffic and is routed on the internal pc lan.

When I say a number of switches we have 6 switches running our office.

What kinda pbx and phones are looking at or have you gotten.

Deirdra

we haven't purchased anything yet. looking at an avaya phone system & have cisco network switches

roryq

Yeah we started with a Trixbox ourselves. And kinda didn't turn out to be stable enough had a couple of serious failures on it.. At that point we changed to a solid pbx running over sip with Basic Rate ISDN as a backup.

Since then not an ounce of issues to be had.

Also with the VOIP we have cut a lot of costs on international calls

Tomtata

Can you tell me,

How many users
How many locations
How many Phones lines
Type of Lines e.g. PSTN, ISDN, PRI etc...

Cheers,

Deirdra

We have approx 300 users, one location & we have a number of PRIs (not sure of exact number) with ISDNs as backup.

davidoco

I work on CUCM 7 (cisco) on a multi site 700+ users and numerous gateways.

We use a voice vlan and a data vlan. Cisco POE switches provide power and IP to phone and there is a switchport in phone which gives IP to pc. Both pc and phone would get individual IP addresses and work off the one RJ45 cable.

Only running 100MB to desk, no need as yet for gig but I would envisage serious cost issues with gig capable phones.

We use 7911 and 7961 desk phones.

If I had a site of 300 users I would only be delivering physical handsets to a fraction of users and softphones on the pc with good quality headsets to the rest. Cisco softphone is very good and IMO very cost effective ie no need for POE switches and zero hardware cost save for the licence cost.

Cisco produce standard gateways which can take any number of incoming PRIs you may have on dual or single port cards. There are also ISDN cards which you can install on your gateway.

The phone system can be installed on a virtual machine but for 300 users you would be better off running it off a dedicated machine. We use two servers for the 7 sites across an MPLS WAN.

OS is easy to work with especially the administrators for moves/changes etc.

bhickey

Hello Deirdre, in an ideal world people generally like to have separate LAN and more importantly separate Internet for voice and data. It's not a problem though to have PC's connected to each phone as it's the Internet leg of the call that most affects quality for external calls. The PBX doesn't really care what network the IP phones are connecting from but if you can then you should still probably try to have as much as possible on separate LAN's, even if it's only maybe some of the phones. Everyone's LAN traffic is different so there's no absolute one rule that you must follow.

As for architecture, a properly setup Asterisk-based PBX in the right hands will handle 300 users and a few PRI's and would probably cost a lot less than a proprietary system.

Tomtata

Hi Deirdre,

Are you looking for a proprietary system e.g. Shoretel / Avaya / Cisco etc...
Or do you want to implement an Asterisk solution?

If cost is a serious concern then you can save 10's of Thousands by going with an Asterisk solution.

Finally do you want to implement the system yourself or use a third party?

---

A very rough guide to pricing an Asterisk setup,

€55,000 – 300x Polycom 550 IP Phones
€8,000 – 8x POE Switches
€3,000 – PRI/SIP Bridge
€8,000 - 2x Dell Servers
€4,000 - Install / Consultancy
€3,000 - UPS to Run it all

Total: €81,000

Deirdra

Thanks everyone

Cost is not really an issue & its more or less been decided that we are going with an avaya system & a third party company will install this for us. Our LAN is also out sourced but for myself I just wanted to have an understanding as to how it would all work together.

Am I right in saying that a switch port can only belong to a single VLAN? Therefore, if you assign a port to a vlan set up for voice & then have an ip phone & pc hanging off the same port, how does the port handle & differentiate traffic from both?

davidoco, I am hoping to only deliver handsets to a fraction of users with the remaining on softphones.

We will not have a separate WAN connection for voice traffic.

Tomtata, can I ask what kind of PoE switch you're talking about for €1000?

Tomtata

See http://ireland.dell.com/ie/en/business/networking/poe/ct.aspx?refid=poe&s=bsd&cs=iebsdt1

Deployed 12x PowerConnect 3548P 18 months ago and never a single issue.

What type of traffic are your PC's / Servers generating? Is it a call centre environment, basic office work e.g. Emails / Office docs / CRM / ERP systems? Need more info.

Deirdra

We have a small call centre 50/60 users, general office traffic & citrix. we also use quite a few web based applications, some of which are hosted in Europe.

Tomtata

ok and the other 240/250 users? Are they in the same building / Same type of general office traffic?

If they are then 100mb would be fine.

Deirdra

Same building, same type of traffic.

I'm not asking about speeds, its more how the vlan set up will work that I need to understand

davidoco

Deirdra wrote: »

Am I right in saying that a switch port can only belong to a single VLAN? Therefore, if you assign a port to a vlan set up for voice & then have an ip phone & pc hanging off the same port, how does the port handle & differentiate traffic from both?

NO, access port on a switch can belong to a number of vlans. Configure example

interface FastEthernet1/0/1
switchport access vlan 101 **** joins vlan number 101*****
switchport voice vlan 201 ***** joins vlan number 201****

So the above access port will switch traffic on either vlan depending on the (network) IP address of the device sending the packet.
For cisco a flavour of QOS is then implemented on the port to bandwidth share and shape

If your WAN/LAN is outsourced you really have to ensure they work with your VOIP installer to ensure that the configuration on your ports are correct. VLANs and QOS is not something you would want to go messing with.

If the decision has been made to install the Avaya (possibly Nortel) product then well and good. When evaluating the different options available for VOIP it would have been very very important that the decision makers checked out the reference sites fully.

Deirdra

Davidoco - thanks for that. That definitely clarifies things a bit for me.

paulm17781

I set up a Nortel system a few years back, PCs hanging off phones gigabit connections. All worked completely solidly. It was the same set up your talking about, all the internal routing was handled by the switches. You could have a phone, PC and softphone all on different vlans, all from the same port.

Deirdra

Thanks Paulm17781

That's very helpful. I may have more questions later

Deirdra

Deirdra

I knew I'd have more questions

Our switches are with the Cisco Catalyst 2960S-48LPS-L (WS-C2960S-48LPS-L) model. As this is a layer 2 switch, do you foreseen any problems with these in relation to the new VOIP system?

Would there be any problems enabling QoS, setting up a voice vlan etc

Is a layer 3 switch preferable?

The plan is to connect the ip phones to the switch ports & then hang the pc/laptop off the ip phone.

Thanks again

davidoco

Deirdra wrote: »

I knew I'd have more questions

Our switches are with the Cisco Catalyst 2960S-48LPS-L (WS-C2960S-48LPS-L) model. As this is a layer 2 switch, do you foreseen any problems with these in relation to the new VOIP system?

Would there be any problems enabling QoS, setting up a voice vlan etc

Is a layer 3 switch preferable?

The plan is to connect the ip phones to the switch ports & then hang the pc/laptop off the ip phone.

Thanks again

You only have 370w of POE on that switch. Therefore can only run say 24 phones rated at 15w. You couldn't put 48 POE phones on the one switch. Although you can (I think on the 2900 series) implement energy wise which can halve the power consumed by the phone.

You can do QOS using 802.1p which is essentially a vlan dictated QOS

Deirdra

ok, only having half the people patched to a switch able to use an ip phone is not ideal!!

I had also been looking at the WS-C3560V2-48PS-S model but this also only has 370w of POE. Do all ip phones use the same amount of power - e.g. 15w, or does it vary depending on the model?

I'll try find out some more information on the energy wise feature you mentioned.

Thanks

bhickey

davidoco wrote: »

You only have 370w of POE on that switch. Therefore can only run say 24 phones rated at 15w. You couldn't put 48 POE phones on the one switch. Although you can (I think on the 2900 series) implement energy wise which can halve the power consumed by the phone.

I've never had any trouble running 48 POE phones on a Dell Powerconnect 3548P (even without the extra power supply). Phones used would typically be a mix of Aastra & Grandstream. It's highly unlikely that a POE switch would ever really need 48x the max rated power of each phone anyway.

davidoco

bhickey wrote: »

. It's highly unlikely that a POE switch would ever really need 48x the max rated power of each phone anyway.

Agree. Also the OP mentioned an Avaya system and it is likely they will therefore be fitting a 1200 series Nortel (read Avaya) phone which have a very low power draw something like max 5w.

We use only 24 port stacked switches as there are a number of large display colour phones which could get plugged in anywhere and possibly a large number in the one switch. As I am responsible for both lan and unified comms the lowest risk solution was applied although these decisions were made in the good times and with cost cutting this luxury may not always be the case.

Deirdra

The model of ip phone has not been decided yet but the two we are looking at are the 1600 & 9600 series.

championc

In terms of Nortel Phones, the 1110 is a Class 2 phone and uses 7w whereas the Class 3 phone 1140 uses 15.4.

So the 370w PoE is sufficient if you just go with Class 2 devices. So you can stick with your 2960's. You will likely have uplink ports and maybe some printers amongst your ports so for every non-PoE used port, it will allow you to use a Class 3 device (maybe some users will need a phone with more advanced features.

While you might run static IP's for PC's, consider using DHCP for phones. You can use Option strings to deploy setting into the IP Phones to ease installation


C