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CME basic Question

skakfinn1
Level 1
Level 1

Lets say that I have 2 vlans in my 2960 switch namely data and voice with 2 dhcp pools one to serve the data vlan and another for the voice. My question is how will my phone recognize that it has to take the ip address from the VOICE dhcp pool.

Thanks

1 Reply 1

Switchport Voice VLAN – What Does It Do?

 

One  of the more tedious parts of any phone system deployment is configuring  the access layer switches to support said phones.  The configuration in  and of itself isn’t complicated, but every port that may receive a  phone needs to be setup correctly.  In Cisco parlance, this is  accomplished with the switchport voice vlan command.   I’ve typed that into the CLI a thousand times and never really knew  what it did besides “make the phones work”.  After a little research, I  finally found some answers.  I thought I’d share them with you.

In the old days, before the Catalyst 2950, configuring a switch port  for use by a phone involved creating an explicit 802.1q trunk.  This  made sense from the perspective that it allowed traffic from multiple  VLANs to pass on a single link.  It also allowed the 802.1p priority  bits for Quality of Service (QoS) tagging to be sent with the frames.   The downside is that it was very difficult for phone mobility.  You  either needed to provision every phone-facing switchport in your  organization to be an 802.1q trunk or you had to leave the phones were  they were.  While the latter is usually the case in most of my  deployments, the mobility provided by the ability to plug a phone in  anywhere in the network and not worry about extra configuration is key  to some clients.  Thankfully, Cisco fixed this starting in the 2950 with  a little concept known as the Auxiliary VLAN.

The Auxiliary VLAN (AUX VLAN) is a specialized VLAN that sits beside a  regular access VLAN configured on a switch (sometimes called a “normal”  VLAN).  The purpose of the AUX VLAN is to allow IP phones to transmit  their payloads along with the untagged data coming from a PC that might  be plugged into a switchport on the back of the phone.  The AUX VLAN  allows these two devices to transmit on the same port without the need  to use an explicit trunk on the link.  In addition, since the port is  not configured explicitly as an 802.1q trunk, extraneous VLANs will not  be flooded over the port.  In essence, the port becomes a two VLAN  trunk.  All the phone traffic is tagged with the ID of the AUX VLAN and  the PC traffic is untagged.  Curiously, according to this document,  the traffic in the AUX VLAN must also carry a Class of Service (CoS) of  5 along with the AUX VLAN ID.  Otherwise, the traffic is dropped.  So  how does the phone get the ID of the AUX VLAN so it can start sending  the traffic?  Ah, that’s where CDP comes in.

Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is very crucial in the operation of a  Cisco IP phone.  It not only provides the AUX (Voice) VLAN ID for the  phone to being sending traffic on the AUX VLAN, it also allows the phone  to automatically negotiate power settings.  This allows the phone to  use less than the maximum 15.4 watts of power under the 802.3af PoE  standard.  If you disable CDP on the port facing the phone/PC you will  likely start pulling your hair out.  Even though the phone might have  already assigned itself in the Voice VLAN, removing CDP from the  switchport in question causes it to forget where to find the voice VLAN.   You’ll need to re-enable CDP and reboot the phone.  You could also  statically configure an 802.1q trunk to fix the issue, but where’s the  fun in that?

One other curious note is that I’ve always been told that the connection between the phone and the switch when switchport voice vlan is configured is a “special 802.1q trunk”.  Not that I’ve ever been able to see that configuration, as show interface trunk seems to think that the port isn’t trunking and show interface  switchport says that it’s an access port.  The key is in Cisco’s  documentation.  The correct term for a port with switchport voice vlan configured  is a “multi-VLAN access port”.  The distinction between the two is that  only the two vlans (voice and access) configured on the switchport will  be accepted on the link.  If you were to do something silly like, oh I  don’t know, plug another switch into the back of the phone and configure  an access port on that switch to be in a different VLAN than the voice  or PC access VLAN, traffic will not pass through the phone port to the  switch.  Once again, that’s because this isn’t a real trunk.  The switch  will only accept tagged frames from the Voice (AUX) VLAN.

Best Regards
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