To allow your Polycom SoundPoint or VVX phones to find the provisioning server automatically, you must deploy DHCP scope options. This quick guide will show you how to achieve this.
For your Polycom phone to find it’s provisioning server, you need to configure one or more of the following options in the DHCP scopes that phones will live:
- Option 160
- Option 161 (LYNC SKU Devices)
- Option 066
The preference is either option 160 or 161, so the phone will check that first, then fallback to the standard option 066. Option 161 is for LYNC SKU Polycom VVX’s, so if you find that your phones are ignoring option 160, this may be the reason why.
Option 160/161
Option 160 and 161 will need to be created as they are non-standard DHCP options:
- Using DHCP Manager right click the network type object (e.g. IPv4/IPv6), then select “Set Predefined Options”
- Click “Add” and enter a descriptive name (e.g. Polycom Provisioning Server). Change the “Data Type” to “String” and enter 160 or 161 as the “Code” value
- Add the option at the server or scope level and specify the path to the provisioning server e.g. ftp://polycomftp.domain.com
Option 066
If you use option 066 (066 Boot Server Host Name) then you just need to configure the pre-defined option with the path to the ftp server e.g. ftp://polycomftp.domain.com
Manual Configuration
If you do not want to automate this you can login to the phones web interface and set the provisioning server manually:
- Navigate to the following location:
- Enter the “Server Address” e.g polycomftp.domain.com
I was wondering why some had 161 and some were 160. Thought someone put glue in the ventilation…
Haha yeah, had me scratching my head for a bit 🙂
If you want to use various config for various VLANs separately, you will need to use a subdirectory on the prov.server to separate configs, so that sub-directory must be added to the end of the URL in Option160/161 (as from the examples above its totally not obvious if only the FQDN can be used, or ftp://polycomftp.domain.com/SUBDIRECTORY1 kind of syntax is also possible)