Introducing the Cisco Small Business Pro ESW 500 Series Switches

We had opted for ESW500 for our business to help enable voice, video and wireless solutions. Initially we were using catalyst line of switches but the problem arouse when i tried to change the native VLAN from both ends. Can anyone tell me is it possible to trunk ESW 500 series and catalyst 3650. Also i m not being able to configure the ESW switches from the command line.Internet Yellow Pages

We just setup our own Cisco's with asterisk after trying a conference call trial from a few websites we figured we'd be better off running the hardware and software inhouse.

I agree a Gigabit port would make so much sense.  But Cisco has be slow to put in gigabit in alot of product.  The new 890 ISR has a gigabit WAN port but 10/100 on the LAN side.  When most if not all of your modern PC's and servers have gigabit interfaces.  But that is my rant for now.

Personally, I can't stand CCA or any of Cisco's web GUIs, but if Cisco wants to offer them as configuration options, that's great. If they improved them, I'd probably even use them more often. However, a CLI or other text mode configuration interface should always be available, especially on a device that's actually running IOS. I can't imagine how miserable my recent UC500 deployments would have been had I been limited to CCA (I hardly used it once I realized how limited it was) or the web GUI (I used this for basic phone and CUE mailbox setup, as well as loading the autoattendant scripts).

What annoys me the most about the lack of a CLI on the Catalyst Express and now the ESW switches is that I suspect Cisco is only doing it to price-protect its lower end Catalyst switches (like the 2960 series) in an attempt to slow the commoditization of basic Ethernet switching, with and without PoE. The continuing fragmentation of the product lines by technological means into "SMB" and "Enterprise" segments solely for marketing and strategic purposes is maddening. If Cisco would segment the product lines through simple positioning and pricing, I'd be all for it. But they keep intentionally introducing artificial incompatibilities and shortcomings in their SMB gear that serve no purpose other than prevent the introduction of the lower-cost devices onto their customer networks with existing Enterprise gear, or to prevent non-forklift upgrades of an SMB infrastructure to an Enterprise one.

A perfect example of this intentional fragmentation is the "SPCP" protocol on the UC500-only phones, which is literally identical to SCCP, except that the phone checks to make sure it's registering with a UC500 instead of a CME. Or the Catalyst Express 500 switches, which actually run IOS but don't allow you to access the CLI. The supposed reason for crippling these products is to "help" the customer by "reducing complexity," but that's hogwash.

It looks as though there is still no way to access the CLI on these switches. Do Cisco not listen???