Tony, LLDP-MED is extremely important for a handset. If one doesn't support it, it means you have to take exactly the steps you mentioned -- hand configuring every device! I'll never do that again. Can you imagine having to do that with fifty or more phones? I have, and it's a nightmare. LLDP makes it easy. We provision the phone in the PBX and plug it in. All done!
I always like to put my phones on isolated VLANs. On HP ProCurve networking kit, you just enabled LLDP, tell the switch which ports my phones are on, and then plug in the phone. The Aastras and Linksys phones *just work*. They get their voice VLAN and the pass-through network ports remain untagged. It's really, really time-saving. It's equally as simple with CDP on Cisco switches, but you know Cisco -- they love to do things their own way. -- Robert Tony Graziano wrote: > While it's nice to have all these capabilities, I don't see how it > matters. Don't take this the wrong way. LLP-MED offers: > > * Network topology-A network management system (NMS) can > accurately represent a map of the network topology. > * Inventory-A management system can query a switch to learn about > all the devices connected to that switch. > * Emergency services-Location of a phone can be determined by the > switch port to which it is connected. > * VLAN configuration-The switch can tell the phone which VLAN to > use for voice. > * Power negotiation-The phone and the switch can negotiate the > power that the phone can consume. > > sipx has 911 calling based on location (by branch in upcoming 4.2). > Polycom and other phones) can be programmed for a 911 gateway in the > event of a proxy failure, which IMO is even better, because the > dependencies are less. > > When I deploy a phone on a vlan, we set the vlan on the phone. POE > negotiates the power. I just use a good POE switch (procurve) that has > a more than generous power budget and does basic L3 routing. > > I'm more concerned about the feature set, useability, manageability of > the phone config via sipxconfig, and of course, vendor (phone > manufacturer) support. > > I don't think NMS or Inventory capabilities matter much. sipx has > discovery tools to find the phones and devices and there is work > ongoing in 4.2 to expand this and auto provision phones without a user > account. My network monitoring tools can find and map my devices, > whether they be phones or not (Nagios, etc.). _______________________________________________ sipx-users mailing list sipx-users@list.sipfoundry.org List Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/sipx-users Unsubscribe: http://list.sipfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/sipx-users sipXecs IP PBX -- http://www.sipfoundry.org/
