Procurve Network & IP Telephony
IP Telephony is something that every network administrator is going to run into at some point in time. Its many features really do help reduce costs across the board. Having a unified network that carries voice and other data services reduces cabling, equipment, and maintenance costs just to name a few. Even with the popularity of IP telephony there are many organizations out there they have yet to take the plunge. This further increases chances that you will find yourself working as part of a telephony project at some point.
If your company has a network with all Cisco devices and a Cisco IP telephony system has been chosen, everything seems straightforward. Cisco is going to make sure their products work well together; otherwise they’re going to have a tough time marketing their telephony system to current Cisco customers. Concerns arise when you have a mixed vendor environment. Will it work? How do the switches need to be configured?
If you have an HP Procurve based network, Procurve has you covered with their interoperability guides. These guides detail how to get phones from various vendors to work with Procurve networking equipment. The guides are very detailed covering configuration of the phones, the switching equipment, and even Call Manager (In the case of Cisco). Each section of the guide includes screen shots of any web interfaces as well as command prompt output you may encounter along the way.
If you are planning to run an IP telephony system on top of HP Procurve gear, these guides will be your source of knowledge more than a few times!
Thanks to “procurvehelp” on Twitter for posting a link to these documents!

