LLDP SoundPoint IP 331 Dell Powerconnect 3458

[xJackiexDaniels]

My company is in the process of switching over to VOIP and we're using Polycom SoundPoint IP 331 phones and Dell Powerconnect 3548 switches. We are trying to use LLDP to assign a VLAN to the phones however the phones will not take the LLDP configure broadcast by the switch.



The phones have been updated to the latest firmware and LLDP is an option within the phone setup. We are currently manually setting the phones to the corresponding VLAN but in the future would prefer to have them grab what they need via LLDP instead.



My guess is that I may be missing some tlv information from my switch LLDP configuration but I can't figure out what.



If anyone has any ideas on how to get LLDP to work with my phones and switches I would be very appreciative!



- Thanks

[SteffenBaierUK]

Hello xJackiexDaniels,

welcome to the Polycom Community.

I would advise to provide the Software Revision and BootROM / Upgrader Version in follow up post's as we are unaware as what you class the latest Software.

Have you checked page 370 onwards on the UCS 4.0.1 Admin Guide => here <= if UCS 4.0.1 is the Software you are running?

Did you check with DELL as there seems to be a few post regarding LLDP with Polycom Phones using a popular search engine ?

One example is => here <= or => here <=

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

Polycom Global Services

[NathanA]

I realize that this is an old-ish thread, but I ran into exactly the same issue: SPIP 335/450/650 running BootROM 4.4.0 and UC 4.0.2B would not accept the LLDP advertisement from our Dell PowerConnect 35XX switch containing the voice network policy.  I tried everything under the sun, and nada.

I was using the following switch configuration (boiled down to its essence):

vlan database
vlan 100
exit
lldp med network-policy 1 voice vlan 100 vlan-type tagged
interface ethernet g4
description TrunkPort
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan add 100
exit
interface range ethernet e(1-48)
switchport mode general
switchport general allowed vlan add 100
lldp notifications enable
lldp optional-tlv port-desc sys-name sys-desc sys-cap 802.3-mac-phy
lldp med enable network-policy location poe-pse inventory
lldp med network-policy add 1
exit

Finally, in frustration, I mirrored the traffic to another port and snooped on it with Wireshark.  All of the TLVs that UC Administrator's Guide listed as "mandatory" were present in the switch's advertisement, plus a few more (since I specified the "lldp optional-tlv" parameter).  The one thing that caught my eye, though, was that one of the optional TLVs the switch was sending ("System Name") was being sent with a null value.

The Dell PowerConnect 35xx series apparently takes its LLDP System Name from whatever you have configured as the "hostname" string.  So I added a "hostname blahblahblah" to the switch's running config, and voila: the SoundPoint phones finally switched to the right VLAN on boot.  Apparently the SoundPoint BootROM does not like it if you pass it a TLV (even an optional one) with a null value.  You don't have to pass the optional TLVs, but if you do choose to include them, they must contain non-null values.

This isn't documented anywhere, of course.

Since I am not intimately familiar with the standards documents that govern LLDP, I cannot say for certain whether TLVs with null values are allowed or not, and so I don't know who is at fault here: Dell or Polycom.  I also never got around to trying it with "sys-name" eliminated from the list of 'optional-tlv's in the Dell config, but I suspect that solution would have worked, as well.

Hope this helps someone else avoid needlessly wasting the same kind of time on this as I did,

-- Nathan