express 500 switches in IPTEL

[dragec]

What are your expiriances with express 500 switches in iptel environment? I am looking cheeper solution then 3560 switches and ... I am not sure about express 500.

thanks

[thisisshanky]

Lot of people dont like the manageability of the 500 series switch as its web interface compared to CLI. We have deployed 500s with a few clients, have had some issues with it initially but the last few installs have been pretty stable..Again if you are limited with the dollar amount, you can definitely go with the 500s, but at the same time to route between vlans you have to rely on a router on a stick model, which means your router should be capable of trunking. If you are using the new ISRs that should not be a problem, but using routers like 1720 is not going to work (1721 does work though), as 1720 doesnt support trunking.

HTH

Sankar

PS: please remember to rate posts!

[paolo bevilacqua]

Let me add something to what Shankar just said. Beside the mere support of inter-vlan routing, you must evaluate the performances too. Nowadays, any PC is able to drive to generate 100 mbps and more during copies, etc. This means that router may actually become a bottleneck if doesn't have enough performances, and you should evaluate at least on L3 switch somewhere in the network. On the other hand, if only reason to have VLAN is to separate voice and data traffic, there will no or little traffic between these, and any router will be fine.

Finally, you will see that 500 is the only L2 switch in the Cisco offering that supports POE. All the other are L3 switch and significantly more expensive. I hope this situation will be corrected soon with full IOS L2 switches from Cisco.