Configure UC560 with Netgear Prosafe Switches

[invtechnologies]

Have a new client setup where they have 2 Netgear Prosafe Switches and have just purchased a UC560 along with about (30) 504 phones.  We have VLAN 100 setup in the netgear switches and think have we have a VLAN trunk between the switch and the UC560.  Plug a phone directly into the UC560 and it works, but plug it into the switch and it will not find the Voice VLAN (vlan 100). 

Since it is a Netgear switch, I presume that it cannot use CDP.  Does this mean that we need to configure each phone for vlan 100?

Do we need to do any special settings on the switches?

Thanks!

[mcasimirc63]

Cisco switches exchange a lot of information via CDP with CIsco phones such as POE and VLAN information.  With that being said you need to go to every phone and manually configure the VLAN information.  With that being said you also can't piggyback the computer to the phone if you do that.  You can either set designated switch ports for the IP phones or use a flat VLAN configuration where all devices will communicate on the same VLAN.  The flat VLAN will allow the computer to plug into the phone and the phone will register properly. The second option will also cause QoS issues depending on the switch and the amount of data traffic.

Once the phones are on the correct VLAN and the switches are trunked properly with the UC500's expansion port, they should be able to reach the UC500's DHCP server pool.

[invtechnologies]

Is there no way to use non-Cisco switches and still have the option to plug both the phone and computer into the same network drop while maintaining the separate VLANs?

[mcasimirc63]

Only if your netgear prosafe switches support Voice VLANs and OUI's.  The OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier) is the first 3 bytes (first 6 characters) of the MAC address and each vendor has a unique OUI.  

If the netgear switch supported OUI's it might have an OUI for Cisco entered already.  Since Cisco has many different OUI's you might need to check your phones and make sure all the OUI's are entered in the switch.  Just in case you have phones that have different OUI's.

Once the OUI's and Voice VLANs have been configured, the switch will tag your IP phone frames with the correct VLAN and your phones should register correctly.  Any frames that pass without a listed OUI will be untagged.   This will allow you to plug the computer into the back of the phone.

[David Trad]

Hi invtechnologies,

The only switches I have seen this work on is the HP switches, since they support a (Hacked) version of CDP the phones will work, although I really question their CDP implementation.

I do believe that HP has dropped this now on their new switches though and everything is moving to an LDAP world, and by the looks of it so is Cisco anyway

Well if the 200/300 series switches is any indication, just a question on when the UC's will go down that path.

Cheers,

David.