[TriLUG] Managed & Unmanaged switches

[Chris Bullock]

Are your VoIP phones tying to a PBX onsite or offsite?  If the PBX is
inside bandwidth is not an issue, due to the fact that your switches will
allocate a full 100mb per port.  If you are tying into an outside source
that is a different source.  However, I think that you need to be looking
at routers/firewalls to do the bandwidth shaping if that is what you are
looking for.
We currently have IP trunks between sites (Avaya IP Office) running over
DSL and the connection is OK, even though we are choking the bandwidth
with non telephony data.
Chris
--- Brian Henning <brian at strutmasters.com> 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
> 
> 
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