Installation guide

Determine Number of ShoreTel Voice Switches Planning and System Design
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ShoreTel 14.2 Planning and Installation Guide 31
Determine Number of ShoreTel Voice Switches
The ShoreTel telephony solution is a mixture of hardware and software components that you install
across your enterprise to create a single telephone system. A critical component to the solution is the
ShoreTel voice switch. Voice switches are the interface that connect the telephones to the ShoreTel
system. These switches provide signaling and call-setup functions for the phones and trunking to
interface with service providers and other telephony networks. The ShoreTel voice-switch portfolio
offers a broad range of telephony switches to meet the needs of our different customers.
For more information about ShoreTel Voice Swithces, see Appendix F, ShoreTel Voice Switches.
For information about the features that ShoreTel supports outside the U.S., see Appendix A,
International Planning and Installation.
WAN Connections
To complete your system design, the final step is to identify your network connectivity. You should
identify the following for the network connections to each site:
 Bandwidth
 Latency
 Jitter
 Packet Loss
Failover
To provide high availability, ShoreTel supports failover at two very important points in the system.
ShoreTel supports failover for the headquarters (HQ) server and for voice switches. For the HQ server,
ShoreTel supports a back-up server that monitors and can duplicate the primary server. If the primary
server fails, the back-up server immediately starts operating as the HQ server with minimal
interruption. After the primary server returns to operation, the system administration must perform a
manual fail-back to restore the servers to their previous operation.
For voice switch backup, ShoreTel supports two approaches. The system administrator can configure
extra port capacity or install a dedicated spare voice switch. A spare voice switch be on a network that
is remote to the failed voice switch.