Introduction
Arne B. Østensen is the team lead of the Cisco TelePresence Solution Group in Cisco's Technical Assistance Center in Lysker, Norway. Before joining Cisco, he worked at Tandberg as a product specialist for telepresence infrastructures. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from the Norwegian School of Information Technology (NITH), Oslo. He has over four years of experience working and supporting telepresence products.
The following experts were helping Arne to answer few of the questions asked during the session: Andreas Wintervoid and Steve Hight. Andreas and Steve are top Voice experts and have vast knowledge in Voice and Telepresence topics..
You can download the slides of the presentation in PDF format Telepresence-webcast-presentation here. The related Ask The Expert sessions is available Ask The Expert:Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server Update here. The Complete Recording of this live Webcast can be accessed TelePresence VCS Webcast here.
Cisco TelePresence Video Communications Server Software Version & Support
Q. Why isn’t the X7.0 software version on www.cisco.com?
A. We do rigorous testing before and after code is released and we found a DNS issue, which we felt would be damaging to a very few customers, but damaging enough that we did not want to have it hence the removal of X7.0 and quick replacement by X7.0.1 which is X7.0 plus the one fix we have 100s of VCSs successfully running X7.0 and actually only seen the issue on 3 VCSs
Q. How many SIP domains can X7 software have?
A. We have now increased the total number of SIP domains to 200 in this version.
Q. How many credentials for authentication can you have in the local database?
A. The X7 now support 10,000 credentials in its local database
Q. From which version can I upgrade to X7?
A. You can upgrade from any versions newer than X5.1.1. So if you are on X5.1.1 or later, you should upgrade the VCS to X5.2 and then upgrade to X7
Q. When is X7.1 expected?
A. The X7.1 final is expected to become publically available in the February/March timeframe
Q. Are there any software dependencies on this release for TMS?
A. You still need to use TMS 12.6 or later when using provisioning or FindMe
Q. When is X7 expected to release?
A. Its available for today for download.
TelePresence Video Communication Server Product related
Q. If you upgrade a VCS without authentication set from X5.2 or earlier, what happens to the zones and subzones?
A. All zones in X5.2 or later will be set to “Threat as authenticated”
Q. Why does my browser say it’s not supported in the VCS WebUI?
A. You probably use Mozilla Firefox version 5 or 6? As Mozilla have updated their Firefox a couple of times lately, we just haven’t added these version is the supported browser list, which the VCS checks. If you are using a newer version than the VCS displays for supported browsers, you should be good to go, and the warning can be ignored
Q. Could you have different amount (unbalanced) call licesnes on the peers in a VCS Cluster?
A. Yes, this is now supported.
Q. What’s the maximum B2BUA call limit?
A. Currently, we have limited this to 50 calls. The 51st call will get “503 Service unavailable”–response
Q. When will VCS be available in VMware on UCS?
A. VCS will be available in the first half of 2012
Q. In a cluster environment if one VCS failes will its licesese be transfered to other active VCS node?
A. Yes
Q. Is this interoperable with OCS 2007 (original release)?
A. VCS products work best with OCS R2 and from X6.1 Lync is also supported. OCS R1 was supported in the early days ... and will still work, but Microsoft have improved a lot, so we do not recommend or support R1 any more preference is to use X7.0.1 with the new B2BUA to connect to OCS R2 or Lync.
Q. What's the difference between vcs and conductor?
A. Conductor is a kind of managing MCUs. If you have 2 or more MCUs conductor will find MCUs which is best fit for components you are trying to integrate and if you have pool of 30 MCUs and more participants and conductor will allign this based on the requirement.
Q. Is the root interface still available to run things like "tcpdump" and "service network restart" ?
A. The root login shell is available in X7.0 but we recommend only accessing it when instructed to do so by TAC.
Q. Does xconfiguration include all the configs in VCS? Reason I ask is if I can use command to backup VCS configs ?
A. As VCS moves forward with additional functionality and shared information in clusters, configuration is gradually moving to a different database and some config remains in xconfig.You will see that in X7.0.1 there are new system snapshot options - logging and status. These are needed to capture the logs and configuration that you used to use xconfiguration.
Q. Is there an impact to simply leaving the log levels that were just on slide 34 at debug all the time?
A. Increasing the log levels will increase the system load of the VCS, so the levels should only be increased when performing troubleshooting, and should be set back when troubleshooting is completed.
Q. How does telepresence connect to communications manager? does it work over the presence interface to communications manager?
A. The VCS can interoperate with CUCM via a SIP trunk. Currently, the presence implementation which the VCS uses is not compatible with the presence implementation in CUCM.
Q. The linux root is extremely valuable. i'm not looking forward to the day when you obfuscate it the way they did with root on CTS codecs.
A. The root shell is both valuable and potentially harmful. We are therefore doing our best to migrate various useful tools (For instance ping, nslookup and traceroute) into the VCS web interface to lessen the need to log into the root SSH shell.
Q. Does audio call from CUCM to control or vice versa use non-traversal license?
A. It depends on the type of calling. If the call is interworking then you will use Traversal license and if the call is H.323-H.323 then in that case you will not use traversal license.
Q. When H.323 endpoint calls SIP endpoint (both registered with the same control) do they use non-traversal license?
A. SIP<->H323 call is a traversal call and will consume a traversal call license on the VCS.
Q. or as an ISO or linux VM to run on any VMware platform?
A. Running on VMware esxi version 5.0
Q. I have heard anecdotally that x7.0.1 may be somewhat buggy. When will x7.0.2 become available?
A. X7.0.2 is due to be available by the end of the year. Not sure where the 'bugginess' of X7.0.1 came from; it has lots of fixes and good new features
Q. Is there any intention to release movi client for mobile platform?
A. Well we will have some kind of early trial release sonn for the Apple IOS and IPad to handle the device capability. More information will be released soon.
Q. Will licenses be transferable from the appliance to the VM environment?
A. No - licences will be per VCS
Q. What about FIPS certification?
A. Not available at present.
Q. What is the maximum number of VCS within a cluster? I am trying to assess what would be the maximum number of endpoint I can support per cluster.
A. Each VCS support 2500 registration and you are able to have 6 VCS in cluster and 4 will be active. That means 10,000 registration is supporter per cluster.
Q. Is Cisco Global Site Selector appliance needed to route calls to different VCS based on location of callers? Can this be done with standard DNS?
A. DNS SRV is our recommended solution
Q. We would like to deploy MOVI to our entire user population (10,000+ users), how do I use the VCS if it only allows 2500 registrations?
A. We have cluster with more than 10,000 registration and its scalable. This is possible if you have more than one cluster.
Q. When using Movi and AD Authentication, could it be possible to not have to use the domain\username format in Movi, to only need just the username without the domain\?
A. If the SIP domain used for provisioning/Movi is identical with your AD domain, you shouldn't have to prepend the username with the domain. If the domains are different, then you will have to prepend the username with domain.
Q. Does VCS X7.0.1 address the Denial of Service security issue recently found in Apache?
A. Yes it does.
Q. Regarding the Conductor - could it be registered with the CUCM
A. Right now it cannot be registered with CUCM .
Q. Will VCS support Cisco Jabber in the future?
A. We are working to make this happen. Hopefully we will have a solution as VCS team is working to get this functionality.
Q: is it possible to upgrade to VCS x7.0 from x5.2?
A. Yes. You can upgrade from x5.2 to x7.0. In earlier versions you need to upgrade to x5.2 and then to x7.0
Q: Could it be possible in the future to not need that domain in the username for Movi and AD?
A. No. You always need the domain name and the username for authentication for Movi and AD.
Q. I missed the url for interoperability with Lync, please provide
A. All VCS deployment guides are available on www.cisco.com
Go to support > VCS and select configuration guide and there is a new X7 and B2BUA with Lync/OCS guide due out in 1 to 2 weeks. OCS and Lync guides are already available for older versions of VCS.
Q. Can a command line backup be done on the vcs?
A. No, a backup should be performed by using the 'Backup and restore' page found in the 'Maintenance' section of the VCS web interface.
Q. Is the documentation for LDAP integration for MOVI clients posted at this time?
A. Yes, the deployment guide is called 'Authenticating devices' and can be found in the 'Configuration guides' section for the VCS on
Two documents exist. Please start with the TMS provisioning deployment guide to configure Movi operation. Once working then use the VCS device provisioning guide for the AD direct authentication and deployment guides for VCS on www.cisco.com
Choose support then VCS then Configuration Guides
Q. Is MOVI supporting multiple P-Asserted-Identy SIP headers?
A. Today only a single P-Asserted ID is used witin the video world. There is no reason why multiple P-Asserted IDs couldn't be used, but VCS will delete ones if the device does not authenticate
Q. What is the best practice for automating backups of a VCS?
A. With X7.0, provisioned devices such as Movi and E20 can access the phone book via the VCS through SIP messaging, instead of getting phone books from TMS (This has not changed since X6.1).
Q. Is Split authentication supported for MOVI; AD and local database?
A. This is not supported, if AD authentication is enabled on the VCS, then AD authentication will be used for all Movi authentication for Movi version 4.2 and higher. Movi 4.1 and older will however still use Local database or LDAP, depending on VCS config.
Q. Will the VCS VM be available in C & E or just E?
A. VCS Control and Expressway versions will be available
Q. Is there any timeframe for supporting encrypted calls with CUCM?
A. This is being worked on - expect to need CUCM version 9.x in order to work with encryption on VCS. Audio encryption does work in CUCM8.6.2 and VCS X7.0.1.
Q. Is there documention on how to implement phone books?
A. For provisioning, the Provisioning Deployment guide contains instructions on how to set up phone books for provisioned devices. For regular phone books, instructions can be found in the TMS documentation on www.cisco.com/support
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Miscellaneous
Q. When will be the presentation available for download?
A. The presentation can be now downloaded at https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-19067
