Cisco UC 500 voice system compatibility with poe switch from other manufacturer?

[htsbbaker1]

Will a Cisco UC 500 voice system work with a poe switch from another manufacturer?  Customer has poe switch already installed and doesn't want to purchase another switch unless a necessity to get full-featured use of the Cisco voice system.  Which Cisco switch with poe and 48 ports would you recommend in this case?  Thank you in advance for any assistance you can give.

[paolo bevilacqua · Accepted solution]

It is important that you use a Cisco switch, otherwise CDP will not work, and you will have a lot of issues, among which being unable to separate voice and data VLANs.

[Brandon Svec · Accepted solution]

Hey Paolo!  You got me by 3 minutes

Good point about CDP, if you don't know too much about building VLANs and trunks and configuring the IP phones you may save time and money by just using the recommended switch CE500, I think?

Brandon

[Brandon Svec · Accepted solution]

Yes, it can work with just about any switch.  A good affordable Cisco solution is the SGE2010P.  It is a 48 port Gig, POE switch and even better- can do layer 3 so you can route VLANS without needing a router.  It is not IOS based, but has a web GUI that allows you to configure everything.

It is easily $4-$5K dollars cheaper than a comparable IOS based Cisco Switch with the same features.

One warning is that it can take a long time to configure through the slow web GUI.  If you are comfortable with command line programming it has an unsupported CLI that has worked very well for me.  http://www.megabot.nl/wp/?p=57

Brandon

[htsbbaker1]

Thank you.  I appreciate all of the useful info.

-Brandon Baker