ShoreTel on Cisco Switches - HELP Required

[Craig]

Hi

Has anyone had experience of installing ShoreTel on old Cisco Switches?

Just beaten Cisco again with ShoreTel for a college, but the college are hoping to use their existing Cisco 4507R (core) and 4006 (edge) infrastructure. These are old switches and end of life with minimal or end of life support.

My gut feeling is these will need replacing, but i'm not a Cisco expert.

Anyone have an opinions? Good and Bad.

Thanks

Craig

[travisbconley]

Even though those switches are technicall near end of life, they are still very fast switched. The key will be if they have the features you need to provide QOS and POE. If that is there, I saw leave them in place and let the college reapthe savings.

[Craig]

Hi Travis

Thanks for the reply.

The current switches have POE and Qos configured. We will be replacing the old Cisco Phone system. I'm hoping to plug straight in.

I just want to make sure the customer expectations are met.

Craig

[ShoreTel_Dave]

802.1af

I am looking here:
Cisco Catalyst 4000 Series Inline Power Solution [Cisco Catalyst 4000 Series Switches] - Cisco Systems

I notice that the "Inline power" solution is not 802.1af compliant, it supports a proprietory cisco power scheme and you need to get a replacement blade:

IEEE 802.3af
Although the IEEE draft for power over Ethernet standards are not yet fully defined, the Cisco Catalyst 4006 chassis, auxiliary power shelf, and PEM are ready to support delivery of up to 15.4 watts per Ethernet port. New inline power line cards supporting both the IEEE 802.3af standard and Cisco inline power implementation will be available when the standard is ratified. For IEEE 802.3af compliance, an existing Cisco 48-port 10/100 Inline Power line card (part number WS-X4148-RJ45V) must be replaced with a new IEEE 802.3af-compliant line card.

I would find out what the part number of the blade is.

[cburgy]

Yikes... the 4500 series only has 20Gbps to the fabric on each slot. We have a University we are working with on a network project that uses 4500s in the distribution layer and they are having problems because of this limitation.

[jlpng]

It should be fine, same port config dont forget the native vlan. The only problem you might run into is the poe, not being AF compliant. Other than that shouldnt be a problem.

[PhoneGuy1108]

We're running on many 3550 PoE switches and in the past had a couple 3500XL's with PoE before they were upgraded. I also ripped out a previously installed Cisco phone system that was running on the switches. They were plenty powerful enough for ShoreTel (unless you're deploying thousands and thousands of phones, the voice is not going to use your bandwidth on a campus style LAN, QoS is what's really important to give the voice priority). We were able to do it without a problem.

Depending on the version of IOS on your 4006 (or possibly even CAT OS depending on how old it is) you may have to go back a bit in your mind for some of the older commands but it is able to be done. You'll probably want to clean up some of the config from the Cisco system as well. Feel free to PM me if you want since I've done this before.