vlan or no vlan?

[churchhouse]

Deploying a new voip system.  We will have dedicated poe switches used for voice traffic only at two sites.  Firewall to prioritise the SIP traffic over VPN.  

The voip system is shoretel.

Question is, do we need to create a vlan at all?

[YenLin]

Hi churchhouse,

From my understanding, you have to create another vlan for VOIP devices.

There are several advantages there.

You can enable voice command on the vlan which you can tag voice vlan to the port you want to connect to voip device.

Some situation requires you to connect pc/nb through IP phone.

You can config qos on the voice vlan.

[Vince_Whirlwind]

Are you saying you have dedicated switch infrastructure for the voice and there is no data traffic on them?

So long as the voice and data traffic never share a common medium, then you do not need VLANs.

Dedicating physical hardware to voice is an approach taken by vendors who lack the knowledge and skills to build you a proper converged solution - you will save money, space, and power by converging your voice and data, as VOIP was designed to be used. Find a vendor who knows what they are doing.