[Asterisk-Users] switches

[Gary G. Hendershot]

-----Original Message-----
From: Satchid [mailto:satchid at telenet.be] 
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 7:31 AM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] switches

Dear Group,
This might be a little OT, but I am lost in this.
What type of network switches is the minimum for use of an asterisk in a 70
telephones and 68 computers environment.  

Can unmanaged switches do the job or is Level 2 or level 3 necessary an why?
The sound quality has to be as good as normal pstn lines.

Thank you,

Willy



I think that with this many devices, I would run two networks.  One for the
computer LAN and a separate one for the phones.  Might put in a router to
bridge the networks for traffic that absolutely has to pass between them but
segregate the traffic as much as possible.  Might even use the Asterisk
machine as the router.

I have not put in anything quite this aggressive, but do have one with 30
computers and 30 phones.  It was done at first using a single network and 3
x 24 port unmanaged Dell 10/100 switches.  Results were acceptable.  Later,
we added an additional 24 port switch and split the computer and phone
networks.  There was a noticeable improvement in overall performance. I am
not sure that you really have to go managed switches.  It may be cheaper to
just split the two services to separate networks.

There are some advantages to going high end managed switches if you are
prepared to go the trouble of configuring vLANs and maybe implement QoS
routing.  If you have not messed with managed switches before, be advised
that they do not come out of the box any smarter than an unmanaged switch.
It takes considerable effort and some expertise to tune these things to
provide some of the fancy features you might want to take advantage of.  The
end results may indeed be superior to using simpler unmanaged switches. 

As with most hardware purchases, these decisions are normally made based on
budget.  Managed switches would be very nice to have in a system supporting
130 devices.  With a good bit of tweaking and tuning, the results should be
superior to what could be achieved with unmanaged switches.  However, if you
want to do it on the cheap, I think you could get the job done by
segregating the traffic on two separate LANs and using unmanaged stackable.

G.Hendershot