Connecting IP phone through cascade switches

[merae]

Hey all,
I have this scenario where I have an Avaya POE switch which I configured using IPO script, and connected the IP phones to it, but this switch is connected as cascade to another Avaya switch which is not POE switch and and it is manually configured (no Qos or anything else most configs are default), my question is: do I need to configure the second switch to be able to handle the voice traffic properly?
What are the most important configs to do so?
Thanks

[zakabog]

Your switches are in a stack, or you just have one plugged into the other? If they are stacked, were they stacked before you ran the script or after? Unless you're passing voice traffic through the non PoE switch you shouldn't need to worry about configuring anything since there's no traffic to prioritize.

[merae]

Thank you,
One plugged into the other, not stacked and the voice traffic will pass through that non POE switch to another site
What should I configure on the non POE switch in this situation?

[merae]

Should I run the IPO script on the non POE switch too?

[zakabog]

I wouldn't recommend it if you're already using the switch since it might cause issues with the existing setup. Are you connecting to the other site over the public internet? If so then the QoS policy won't really do much and as long as your switch configuration is already working then I wouldn't touch it.

If you'd like to enable it anyway then I'd recommend just manually building the voice VLAN on the non PoE switch and configure the two trunk ports. That way you're not changing the config of every port on the switch to support something you aren't using.

[merae]

Yes actually this POE switch is used to connect the IP phone and IP office only where the none POE switch is the core switch which the FW is connected to , the two sites will be connected through VPN over the internet, so I was confused whether or not I should configure the core switch to support the voice traffic that is coming through it from the POE switch and goes to the FW (VPN) to the other site.
so if I didn't touch the core switch would that affect the voice quality or phone connectivity to the other site ?

[zakabog]

If the site to site VPN is only used for voice traffic then you don't need to do anything. If you are also sending data across the site to site then you'll need to setup a firewall policy to prioritize traffic from the voice subnet.

[merae]

Thanks Zak
I forget about that too, so nothing is needed to be configured on the core switch?

[zakabog]

Nothing on the core switch as long as you're already passing the traffic, if the traffic isn't going through then you might need to configure a VLAN and trunk ports.

The script just sets up a basic QoS rule, two VLANs and LLDP so you can have a converged network, since you're not plugging the phones into the core switch it wouldn't be worth running. I would make sure that you have spanning tree configured properly though, so no one can accidentally loop the core and PoE switches by plugging in the data port from the phone into the data switch.

[merae]

Great, Thanks a lot Zak