In short, yes. This is because you're most likely not doing QOS on the LAN. Which means the elf bowling e-mail to that production guy shares the same priority as the call the CEO made to his wife. With the vlan you are effectively segmenting them completely from each other. Even if they share the same copper, logically they'll be on different networks.
There are a few things you must make sure of though. Your switches have to handle 100Mb/full duplex. You should really be running CAT 5E if you can help it. And I would try to do all dhcp from one server for both networks. Multiple dhcp servers will cause headaches down the road that will have you scratching your head and asking how a phone got a pc address. I think that touched on everything. Good luck. ********************************* Thank you, Jason Morris Sent from my Blackberry ________________________________ From: Evan Brastow To: NT System Admin Issues Sent: Thu Dec 17 17:40:18 2009 Subject: OT: VLAN question Preface: I have no idea what I’m talking about. With that out of the way, I have a network consultant and a phone supplier that are a little bit at odds. We just purchased an Allworx IP phone system. All was going well until it was made active today and because apparent that voice quality was horrible. The IP part is only internal… External calls go over standard analog lines. But the problem is with internal calls as well as external. The Allworx phones share a 100Mbps network with the computers. We’re a small company (smaller than ever) with about 25 computers and 19 phones, BUT, a lot of those phones and computers are out in production areas and receive VERY little use (i.e., someone will log in/out of a job once every few hours, and make a phone call once a day out there.) There are probably only about 8-10 active computers, and fewer active phones. The way it’s configured is that the phone sits on the same cable as the computer. It goes from the wall jack to the phone, and then from the phone to the computer. The phone are on the same subnet as, and get IP addresses from the same DHCP server as the computer network. When phone calls are made, there’s echoing, latency, static, etc… The switch is an HP ProCurve 2810-48G. Cabling is all CAT5 at least. The phone supplier is telling me that the way to segment the traffic to make sure there are no voice quality issues is to create a VLAN on the switch. But my IT consultant is saying, “What’s to segment? Everything’s on the same cable and on the same subnet?” It appears now that the phone supplier is saying that he can create a VLAN, and then they would use the Allworx phone system server as a DHCP server for the phones, which would put them on their own subnet, thereby making all the traffic flow better and the calls clearer. He said he’d have to link the two VLANS together as there are computer apps that interface with the phone system. So, my question is (because I don’t know much about this end of networking,) does this sound like creating a separate VLAN is really going to help improve bandwidth and increase call quality? Thanks so much ☺ Evan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The pages accompanying this email transmission contain information from MJMC, Inc., which is confidential and/or privileged. The information is to be for the use of the individual or entity named on this cover sheet. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, please immediately notify us by telephone so that we can arrange for the retrieval of the original document. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
