In the spec sheet for the ESI-600 system it states briefly that it supports Dot1Q VLANs. I have had an ESI 600 (and a 1000 for a brief period) for some time and am very familiar with the administration and haven't needed this functionality until now.

We are moving into a new building and in an effor to reduce drop count to offices would like to run some of our data connections through the IP phones. I have three different switch rooms on a floor, each in it's own VLAN, and I have a voice VLAN set up just for the ESI system.

Ideally, the data should be in (for example) VLAN 1 and the voice should be in VLAN 10. However, as it stands now I don't know how to get in to the switch in the IP phones to provision this. If I set the switch port that the phone plugs in to to the data VLAN, the phone can't contact the system. If I set the switch port to the voice VLAN, the PC can't get an IP from the DHCP server.

What I'd like to do is set up a trunk port on the switch to trunk both the data and voice VLANS, but in order to do that I need to set up the switch inside the ESI IP phone to tag traffic with the appropriate VLAN info. Do the phones even support this? If not, what is the Dot1Q functionality that the data sheet speaks of? Thanks very much for any help!

VLAN support for each IVC card has to be turned on on the ESI 600 switch. Your reseller should be able to do this.

the code point is

voice 46
signaling 26

you can't change them

Thanks...not exactly what I was hoping for but appreciate the info nonetheless.

As stated above VLAN is enabled and assigned in the PBX not in the phones.

802.1Q
The IEEE's 802.1Q standard was developed to address the problem of how to break large networks into smaller parts so broadcast and multicast traffic wouldn't grab more bandwidth than necessary. The standard also helps provide a higher level of security between segments of internal networks.

The 802.1Q specification establishes a standard method for inserting virtual LAN (VLAN) membership information into Ethernet frames.

A VLAN is an administratively configured LAN or broadcast domain. Instead of going to the wiring closet to move a cable to a different LAN, network administrators can accomplish this task remotely by configuring a port on an 802.1Q-compliant switch to belong to a different VLAN. The ability to move endstations to different broadcast domains by setting membership profiles for each port on centrally managed switches is one of the main advantages of 802.1Q VLANs.