[TriLUG] Managed & Unmanaged switches

[Jason Tower]

what you want is QoS (quality of service) on both the managed switch and 
the router/firewall.  most decent managed switches produced in the past 
few years have some form of QoS featureset, if it's an older switch 
then it might not.  as for the router/firewall it all depends on what 
you have, but you can certainly roll your own using linux or (even 
better) openbsd that can do QoS as well.

jason

On Wednesday 02 March 2005 09:15, Brian Henning wrote:
> This is probably going to be right up Jon Carnes' alley:
>
> Somewhere in the distant future, my current employer may be moving to
> VoIP telephony.  I remember hearing that it's best to have managed
> switching hardware supporting a VoIP infrastructure, as it allows a
> way to guarantee that the phones always have the bandwidth they need.
>  My question is thus:
>
> Would it work to have one managed switch to serve the VoIP phones,
> which would also feed an unmanaged switch to handle other nodes? 
> Such as described by the following beautiful diagram:
>
> }}}}
>   }}}}}}}}}
> Internet }}--[firewall]---[managed sw]----[unmanaged sw]
>   }}}}}}}}}                   |    |              |
> }}}}                         /    \              |
>                              /      \         [Rest of the computers]
>                   [VoIP phones]     |
>                             [Some computers]
>
> (Where of course "computer" means any node that isn't a VoIP phone)
>
> It seems to me that the above arrangement would allow the managed
> switch to, er, manage the total allocation of bandwidth between
> outside and the phones, and all the traffic passing through the
> unmanaged switch could be clamped by the managed switch on its way to
> the outside if necessary...  Right?  And that would allow us to
> continue getting value out of our current hardware..
>
> Or am I completely flawed in my reasoning?
>
> Thanks as always!
>
> Cheers,
> ~Brian