Specifications

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Cisco Unified IP Phone 7906G and 7911G for Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0
OL-21033-01
Chapter 2 Preparing to Install the Cisco Unified IP Phone on Your Network
Understanding Interactions with Other Cisco Unified Communications Products
Understanding How the Cisco Unified IP Phone Interacts with
Cisco Unified Communications Manager
Cisco Unified Communications Manager is an open and industry-standard call processing system.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager software sets up and tears down calls between phones,
integrating traditional PBX functionality with the corporate IP network. Cisco Unified Communications
Manager manages the components of the Cisco Unified Communications system—the phones, the
access gateways, and the resources necessary for features such as call conferencing and route planning.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager also provides authentication and encryption if configured for
the communications system.
For information about configuring Cisco Unified Communications Manager to work with the IP devices
described in this chapter, refer to Cisco Unified Communications Manager Administration Guide,
Cisco Unified Communications Manager System Guide, and Cisco Unified Communications Manager
Security Guide.
For an overview of security functionality for the Cisco Unified IP Phone, see Overview of Supported
Security Features, page 1-11.
Note If the Cisco Unified IP Phone model that you want to configure does not appear in the Phone Type
drop-down list in Cisco Unified Communications Manager Administration, go to the following URL and
install the latest support patch for your version of Cisco Unified Communications Manager:
http://www.cisco.com/kobayashi/sw-center/sw-voice.shtml
Related Topic
• Telephony Features Available for the Cisco Unified IP Phone, page 5-1
Understanding How the Cisco Unified IP Phone Interacts with the VLAN
The Cisco Unified IP Phone 7911G has an internal Ethernet switch, which enables forwarding of packets
to the phone and to the network port and access port on the back of the phone. The Cisco Unified IP
Phone 7906G has an Ethernet port, which enables forwarding of packets to the phone and to the network
port.
If a computer is connected to the access port (Cisco Unified IP Phone 7911G), the computer and the
phone share the same physical link to the switch and the same port on the switch. This shared physical
link affects the VLAN configuration on the network in the following ways:
• Although current VLANs might be configured on an IP subnet basis, additional IP addresses may
not be available to assign the phone to the same subnet as other devices that connect to the same port.
• Data traffic present on the data/native VLAN may reduce the quality of Voice-over-IP traffic.
• Network security may necessitate the isolation of the VLAN voice traffic from the VLAN data
traffic.
You can resolve these issues by isolating the voice traffic onto a separate VLAN, so that the switch port
to which the phone is connected uses separate VLANs for the following types of traffic:
• Voice traffic to and from the IP phone (auxiliary VLAN, on the Cisco Catalyst 6000 series, for
example)
• Data traffic to and from the PC connected to the switch through the access port of the IP phone
(native VLAN, 7911G only)