4500G and Voice VLAN

[Bortiquai]

We have a 4500G PWR switch, and NBX v3000. Could someone explain the Voice VLAN feature, and when it could be used.



Thanks

[Luckycharms]

When there are VoIP devices and PC's on a network its best to keep their traffic seperate.



The Voice VLAN on 3Com switches is simply a VLAN preconfigured and uses a MAC ACL to recognise specfic VoIP devices i.e. 3Com phones, CISCO Phones etc.



On other vendor switches the VLAN for all your VoIP devices must be created and configured from scratch.

This message was edited by Luckycharms on 6-26-09 @ 2:35 PM

[Bortiquai]

So the voice traffic is identified by the MAC of the device where the packet originates. So someone using a SoftPhone (i.e. 3Com PCXSET) wouldn't be identified as voice traffic?

[dls]

Technically, it is the OUI, (the first 6 digits of the MAC) that is used.  All phones from a given manufacturer will have the same OUI.  The switch comes with a handful already defined.  The list can be expanded by defining additional OUIs to be recognized by using the "voice vlan mac-address" command in the CLI. 

The real fun comes in defining the VLAN and port configuration paramters.  A port will need different configurations depending on the attached device (another switch / IP phone with pass thru traffic / PBX / etc).

We got it to work (and quite nicely, by the way), but the documentation could be better.