Big Hosted VOIP Network

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

We are in the process of building a completely new local network parallel to an existing data network in a hospital for Hosted VOIP. There will be all brand new Cat5e for every floor for every building with fiber from each floor down to the Com Room connected via fiber to Ethernet converters into a master switch that will lead into a Balance 1350. There are also 3 other buildings with hundreds of phones that will be connected back the main Com Room in Main building via Fiber. We have 3 Gig ISP circuits ready to go for fail over capabilities.

We pretty much have everything down pat in terms of Physically setting up the proper way, well atleast in my eyes, but I have a few questions and was wondering if anyone has a lot of experience with VLANs. I have some experience but only in creating 2 at most, not a network that requires around 10 VLANs. I am planning on using HP Procurve J9727A’s and J9729A’s mostly because I have had great experiences with them in the past with reliability and I know the Web GUI. These are also all POE and Gig.

I was going to make a VLAN for every 2-3 floors or so because each floor has about 80 phones.

I need insight on 2 things:

  1. What would be the best way t VLAN this environment in terms of tagging and untagging which ports on every switch and all these switches will be leading to a master switch.
  2. Any recommendations on a master switch, it’s going to need to be minimum 24 ports, all gig, not poe, web GUI manageable, extremely reliable, cost doesn’t matter, and not cisco.

*Another thing is I am planning on having another brand new 1350 racked right underneath the main 1350 for HA capability with exact settings as the master. If the Master goes down for whatever reason, how fast can the slave take over? Because having 2000+ phones for a hospital go down may not go over so well with people that are dying or emergencies.

ANY recommendations at all for anything would be appreciated. I am just trying to cover all grounds and quadruple check all work before eventually going live with this. Thanks

2

Hi,
Sounds like a fun deployment! Would love to help out. Am a big Fan of the HP Procurve Switches - especially when used with their Intelligent Management Center for single window view. Although if you haven’t already, I would recommend you have a play with the Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch ES-48-750W which is half the price of the 48 Port HP POE and fully featured (with support for 10GB SFP+), and you get their UniFi SDN platform which is gorgeous. If you went down the Ubiquiti route you could then spend the money saved on a pair of Balance 2500s with their 10GB SFP+ ports and a 10GB core Switch Stack for everything to hang off of… just an idea :wink:

As you note, sensible use of VLANs will really make deployment and subsequent management easier (especially from a security perspective as you don’t want anyone accidentally plugging a windows pc into your VoIP network and hogging bandwidth with updates). Happy to give some input and help with planning the 1350 config also. The VRRP failover process takes about 15 secs as standard. 3gstore did a video demoing it a while back which you might find interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN2HYCNc4eU

If you’d like to PM me your email, we can work on the network design in more detail offline.