LLDP Avaya 9600 Series Phones

[dpc-itsupport]

Starting to think I should have gone with a different vendor, having issues getting the switch to play nice with LLDP and the phone.  I have opened a case but here are my details.  I actually do this for my day job but support my church after hours and we have upgraded all of the switches with POE for a new IP Office implementation. 

I am running a mix of SG300-28P switches and one sg500-52P switch.  I have a pretty straight forward configuration, data vlan is untagged with the voice being tagged, e.g. the ports are setup as trunks with the native(pvid) vlan for data and voice for tagged.  All of the Smartports, OUI stuff has been turned off even the auto voice vlan, I manually created a LLDP network policy with the voice vlan identified and qos that I wanted then applied that policy to the ports and of course LLDP is enabled.  I am also running the latest cisco code, in the beginning I didn't see any LLDP information coming from the phone so I upgraded the firmware to the latest Avaya has released, model is 9608. 

Here is what I am seeing and have a wireshark trace, I see the switch sending out LLDP packets and I see the phone respond back with all of its information but the switch doesn't do anything with the information, the switch never responds with a LLDP packet to tell it to use the voice vlan and tag the packets.  In fact if you do a show LLDP neighbors, you never see the phone when its booted up, like its not even there....

Has anyone seen this with Avaya phones and the SG series of switches?

[dpc-itsupport]

Well I have spent hours (6-8 hours) trying to get the switches coperating and playing nice with everything and I am just talking layer 2 stuff, basic stuff like trunking etc...I spent 2 hours trying to figure out why trunking on the voice vlan was not working going to my router when the other vlan was working, thinking it was the router etc, I tore stuff down and rebuilt it on the router and still nothing. 

I finally broke things down to the basics and started looking at the switch and determined that the ^%$^% switch did not have a cam entry (sorry old scholl for dynamic mac address table) for the port when I was plugged into it...are you kidding me!  I created a new vlan and painted the port an low an behold I saw the mac address like I expected.  Now I knew it was something to do with the voice vlan I changed the voice vlan to something else and then tried to delete the voice vlan and it would not let me, gave me an error message about it still being used by something...I should have probably wrote it down but I was too mad at the time.

I rebooted the switch and when it came back online I deleted the voice vlan which it allowed me to do, then recreated it with the same number, assigned it back to the voice vlan and finally assigned it back to all of the ports and previous trunks.  That brings up another issue, maybe their is an easy way to do it in the GUI and I just don't understand how to manage valns on port with the GUI, but assigning and chainging vlans via the GUI is just god awful and frustrating.  I found that dropping to the CLI and doing things much faster and much easier like assiging the one vlan to a range of ports.

Once I had the old vlan back on there I verified that the mac address was showing up and everything on the vlan now worked.  I wasted 2 hours on this and it was basic layer 2 that was not working due to something with the vlan that was messed up.

Bottom line with the software on these switches is break things down and verify that at least the basic stuff is working then work your way up from there.  I went with cisco hoping/thinking that the software would be better then the "other" competitors which I have used and they are not perfect either.  But this issue along with LLDP not working properly would have led me to a different vendor I have lost all confidence in these now and will just try to use as few features as possible to hopefully eliminate other issues. 

Sorry for the winded response but after my frustration I wanted to post it in case someone else has the issue -

*rant* off

[Nagaraja Thanthry]

Hello Tom,

We are currently investigating the  interop issue between the Switch and the phones. Our Engineering team is  looking into the collected forensics. We will update you as soon as we  have identified the root cause.

Thanks,

Nagaraja

[bhackbarth]

For what it's worth to this thread, I had to upgrade the software on a few Mitel controllers which in turn upgraded the FW on the IP sets; I figured what the heck, I'll try auto voice vlan again.  A very default config - Auto Voice VLAN enabled, voice vlan is 1, CoS 5, DSCP 46, auto smart port enabled, and LLDP-MED network policy - Voice Application - Auto checkbox is checked. The only thing I changed was that I didn't want smartport to look for other switches and APs. I saw the macros come up in the config as ip_phone_desktop and under LLDP neighboors it lists a bunch of 'MITEL 5330 IP', so I assume that means everything is working. No idea on if the voice traffic is being CoS and DSCP tagged yet, but if auto voice vlan sees these LLDP memberships I believe it takes care of that, since i have the LLDP-MED Voice policy set to auto.

The real reason I wanted to try this again, is that DHCP Option 43 no longer worked after the aformentioned Mitel updates. Isn't technology grand? I plan to leave the config as is if someone can confirm I have set up auto voice vlan correctly.

[Tom Watts]

Brayton, here is a lldp document working with spa509 phone. It shows the end to end config for lldp + auto voice vlan

https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-27005

-Tom
Please rate helpful posts

[bhackbarth]

Thanks Tom,

  Since my voice vlan is still the native VLAN at this point, I can turn off auto smartport for now. LLDP-MED dynamically applies DSCP and CoS tags to voice traffic which I verified under Administration -> Discovery - LLDP - LLDP Local Information - and when choosing an interface with an IP phone plugged in, the Network Policy Table at the bottom shows the Voice policy from Auto Voice VLAN.

However, in the future, when I change the voice VLAN to something other than the native VLAN, Smartport will need to be enabled at that time. Otherwise there will be no dynamic switchport trunk commands in the config. The administration guide says "Unlike telephone OUI, Auto Voice VLAN mode depends on Auto Smartport to dynamically add the ports to the voice VLAN". That statement is a tiny bit misleading because it suggests that Auto Voice VLAN simply won't function without Auto Smartport.  LLDP and CDP in fact do all the hard work.

[gcloutier]

Hi everybody,

I have a SF200-48P with the latest firmware (1.2.9.44) and my LLDP is not working. I was able to make my Avaya 9608 find the VLAN 3 with the option 242 in the DHCP but in the LLDP statistics, all the Rx frame are discarted and in error. Nothing show up in the LLDP neighbor. I opened a case with at the Cisco support line but they were saying that I need to manually enter the VLAN info in the phone to make it work. I read a bit more on the LLDP protocol and when it's properly configured with MED and auto voice vlan LLDP should be plug and play and I should not have to manually enter my VLAN ID in the phone or having to use my DHCP option.

I sense something is wrong with the switch and I can't find what is it.

BTW my support case # is 625272259

[dpc-itsupport]

Guillaume Cloutier wrote:
Hi everybody,
I have a SF200-48P with the latest firmware (1.2.9.44) and my LLDP is not working. I was able to make my Avaya 9608 find the VLAN 3 with the option 242 in the DHCP but in the LLDP statistics, all the Rx frame are discarted and in error. Nothing show up in the LLDP neighbor. I opened a case with at the Cisco support line but they were saying that I need to manually enter the VLAN info in the phone to make it work. I read a bit more on the LLDP protocol and when it's properly configured with MED and auto voice vlan LLDP should be plug and play and I should not have to manually enter my VLAN ID in the phone or having to use my DHCP option. 
I sense something is wrong with the switch and I can't find what is it.
BTW my support case # is 625272259

I assume you have read through the thread but what I found during my testing is that LLDP and the 96XX phones ( I was testing with 9608 and 9611 phones) were not playing well at all.  I even did sniffer traces and provided them to Cisco, they admitted they saw the issues.  I just recevied an email from them on the issue and they have stated that they have test firmware available to do some testing, the problem I have is I do not have a lot of time to test, you may want to give them my SR 623773495 and see if you can get the testing firmware...

[gcloutier]

Could you provide it to me or I really need to see with them?

[dpc-itsupport]

Guillaume Cloutier wrote:
Could you provide it to me or I really need to see with them?

I haven't received the software yet, I replied back to the email I received but I would suggest having them refer to my case #, it should have all of theose details in it.

[jialbert]

Hi Tom,

Please download the latest 1.3.0 firmware, thanks.

http://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=283019669&flowid=18907&softwareid=282463181&release=1.3.0.59&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest

http://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=284099563&flowid=32149&softwareid=282463181&release=1.3.0.59&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest