Cisco VOIP phones on Avaya switches

[brazenhead]

I might have posted this in the Nortel / Avaya IP Telephony  forum ... but has anyone experienced any major issues or know of a loss of functionalility when using Cisco VOIP phones on Avaya POE switches (55xx or 56xx series)? I need to decide between Cisco and Avaya VOIP phones (not really looking for opinions on phones here, just any known issues or pertinant facts). Thanks.

[Michael McNamara]

Well I'm not sure I would recommend mixing and matching phones with call servers. What Call Server are you running? If you are going to be running a Cisco Call Server you should probably stick with Cisco IP phones. If you are going to be running an Avaya Call Server you should probably stick with Avaya IP phones.

If you meant to ask the pro/cons of using Avaya or Cisco PoE switches, there are some feature differences but both vendor IP phones work fine on either switch.

Cheers!

[brazenhead]

We will either have Cisco phones with Cisco call server or Avaya phones with Avaya call server. The POE switches are Avaya - this is not going to change.

[brazenhead]

Let me elaborate a bit - I am considering using Cisco phones and Cisco call manager for our upcoming (new) VOIP deployment. I do not see any compatability issues at all with Cisco phones on an Avaya network, but I am wondering if anyone has come across any issues that are not well known. I do not expect there to be any but I thought I would ask anyway. From experience, I know that Avaya phones work well on a Cisco network, and that Avaya phones work well on an Avaya network, but I have no experience with Cisco phones on an Avaya network.

[brazenhead]

Does anyone know right off if Avaya's ADAC will work with a Cisco phone? And does an Avaya switch's lldp-med work okay with a Cisco phone? I guess the easiest thing might be for me to obtain a Cisco phone and test it out myself ... unless someone can save me trouble??

[Michael McNamara]

You can use LLDP-MED to assign the voice VLAN to the Cisco IP phones but you can't use ADAC as it's a proprietary Avaya/Nortel solution.

I believe it's been done many a time and discussed both here and on my blog.

Cheers!

[Dominik]

I have over 10.000 Cisco IP Phones running on Avaya Switches without any issues.
If you choose a one vendor solution you will have bit more comfort.
With Avaya ADAC or Cisco CDP you can manage your IP Phone rollout with more comfort, but it will also work with a mixed vendor rollout.

Cheers

[brazenhead]

Hi thanks for the responses. Just to verify a couple of things Flinstone, you DO successfully use ADAC to configure the switchports with your Cisco phones? What do you use CDP for? My understanding is that the switches don't even acknowledge the CDP traffic since it a Cisco proprietary protocol ... hence the need to use lldp-med.

[Flintstone]

Hi brazenhead,
I don't know how I got drawn into this discussion 

Anyway, CDP is for Cisco devices only and ADAC for Avaya devices only!

CheerZ

[brazenhead]

LOL ... Sorry Flinstone ... I meant to say Dominik!

[Dominik]

I use a static configuration and donīt use either CDP or ADAC.
I had so many trouble with voice engineers, that I didnīt trust any configuration that they make on their fancy IP Phones.

Do you have a voice engineer in your staff that knows something about networking ?

[msimms]

Our company runs Cisco phones over Avaya 55xx switches.   One issue:  Avaya switches cannot drive enough power to have a Cisco phone on every ERS port, other than that, no issues ,   so watch your power consumption on the switch, else phones will start powering themselves off if too much power is being drawn, 
if you want to put phones on every port you'll need to purchase extra avaya ERS power supplies for the edge farm.

[Michael McNamara]

You can add a BayStack 15 RPSU with an additional 600W power supply to offset the power supply in the switch itself.

How many watts does a typical Cisco IP phone draw?

An Avaya i2002 draws about 3.195 watts of power, a 1140e draws about 5.953 watts of power. I believe each ERS 5520 switch has about 320 watts of power for PoE devices. So even if I was to fill an entire ERS 5520 with 1140e IP phones that would only amount to 285 watts. Now obviously this is only the draw once they've booted up and are running but I'm curious how much power the Cisco IP phones are drawing.

Cheers!

[Dominik]

As it always is.... Cisco devices are hungry for energy, the standard Cisco 7962 phone (monochrome display) has an avarage power consumption ~4.0 - 4.2 Watts.
I have some ERS4500 that are completly populated with these phones. If you have some newer Cisco Phones e.g. the bkinky Cius Tablet with PhoneDock you should think about POE+ Switches.

[msimms]

We use Cisco color phones (7965 15.4W max, and 7995 12.9Wmax ), with a few monochromes.   power draw varies depending on what the employee is doing with the phone at the time

Typical usage:
#show poe-power-measurement
Unit/Port  Volt(V)  Current(mA)   Power(Watt)
---------  -------  -----------   ---------------
1/1        0.0      0             0.000
1/2        0.0      0             0.000
1/3        0.0      0             0.000
1/4        0.0      0             0.000
1/5        48.2     146           7.037
1/6        0.0      0             0.000
1/7        48.1     175           8.417
1/8        48.2     149           7.181
1/9        48.2     137           6.603
1/10       48.1     196           9.427
1/11       0.0      0             0.000
1/12       48.1     164           7.888
1/13       48.1     161           7.744
1/14       48.1     128           6.156
1/15       48.1     140           6.734
1/16       48.1     164           7.888
1/17       48.1     143           6.878
1/18       48.1     169           8.128
1/19       0.0      0             0.000
......