Nowadays IP phones are commonly used in office environments to give voice traffic a higher priority is an important consideration when designing a network. In a common scenario the IP phone is connected to a switch on one end while linking the PC or laptop on the other end bridging both devices. In this case, Voice VLAN is an important feature used to easily mark and prioritize voice packets from IP phone, separating data packets from the PC. In the following configuration guide, the goal to achieve is to separate traffic between the IP phone and PC without having to set individual VLAN tags for them. The Switch will add VLAN tags for voice & data packets separately upon receiving them and then forwarded to the uplink.
Scenario:
Configurations for Nebula Cloud Switch
The following steps are applicable for switches supported on Nebula Control Center.
1. Configure the switch ports
In this example for Nebula switches, data and Voice VLAN are separated from management VLAN.
Navigate to:
Site-wide > Configure > Switches > Switch Port
Select and edit the port(s) which are connected to the IP phones, and set the port type as “access”. Assign a PVID for the ports. PVID is used to tag the data packets with the VLAN ID. Next we’ll let “Voice VLAN” feature to identify the voice packets for the switch.
2. Set up Voice VLAN
Navigate to:
Site-wide > Configure > Switches > Switch Settings
Then configure Voice VLAN settings. Specify the VLAN ID and OUI addresses of the IP phones. OUI are the first 3 bytes (first six digits) of a MAC address that represents the vendor. Through specifying the IP phone MAC address, the switch can identify voice traffic accordingly. Nebula cloud switch supports up to 6 vendor OUIs.
After saving Voice VLAN settings, all the switches in the same Nebula site will then be able to recognize and prioritize voice traffic.
3. Summary
This guide demonstrates the ease of configuring Voice VLAN on cloud managed switches. In general, separating VLANs and determine rules for data and voice achieved the goal of prioritizing voice traffic without additional configuration on the IP phones.
How to setup VLAN:
How to configure VLAN on Zyxel Switch [GS/XGS-Series]
GS1900: How to configure VLAN on Zyxel Switch
If you want to learn / know more about our VLAN design, please have a look here:
VLANs - Tagged VLANs vs. PVID (Setup Example Untagged/Tagged VLAN on a GS22XX-Switch)
VLANs - A deeper look at how they work
Setup Assistance, you´re looking for assisted configuration by our Professional Services Team? Please check here: Zyxel ConfigService Switch
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