Bringing up a Remote Site

[daviddperez09]

Hello all,

I have been given the task to provide manangement with a cisco solution for bringing up a remote site in NYC.

Our main office is in Los Angeles, details : CUCM cluster 9.x (Pub, Sub) CUC 9.x, MGCP - C2900 w/ T1 connection to the PSTN.

NYC office is about 20 users and the main feature management would like is 4 digit dialing

I was looking to gather information on best practices for bringing up a remote site. We currently have a UCS C220 M3 deployed in new york running vmware with no cisco servers deployed yet. Here are a few of my questions :

To achieve PSTN / WAN connectivity, should frame relay, MPLS, or site-to-site VPN be used ?

Should a subscriber be deployed or should CME / SRST be used ?

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

David,

Ideally an MPLS connection will be the best option. This way you can have phones in the Remote site hangin off CUCM. You will also need to have a local gateway on site for PSTN breakout. This router can also double up as the SRST gateway and media resources gateway.

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[daviddperez09]

hmm i see. so if we do MPLS for WAN between LA and NYC, we would only need a gateway for local pstn connection and for the WAN itself obviously. The NYC gateway would be configured on the CUCM in LA using MGCP or H323 and SRST?

There is no need for a subscriber in NYC since they phones would register to the LA sub and fail over to the gateway in the event of WAN failure?

could a subscriber in NYC provide failover is the WAN goes down? Then the SRST router would provide secondary failover if the Subscriber in nyc goes down too ?

thank you so much for your help

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Yes once you have an MPLS network then you have direct connectivity to CUCM. You then need a gateway for PSTN break out. The gateway can be configured as h323, mgcp or sip.It all depends. I prefer a sip trunk. Configuration is easy and troubleshooting is even easier. However if you are not familiar with sip you can do h323. It gives you greater flexibility in some cases thst MGCP.

You dont need a subscriber at a remote site. I mean that will be killing an ant with a Machine gun! You can have a subscriber at the remote for physical resiliency only. yes the phones will failover to the local gateway in the event of a WAN failure.

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[daviddperez09]

ahh okay okay that sounds like a great plan. Once the phones are registered to CUCM via MPLS, the phones will use the nyc gateway for local calls via the PSTN and the WAN would be used for 4 digit extensions and teho. Any recommondations on a great gateway with srst ?

Thank you again, this is very helpful

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

There are other things to consider before you choose your gateway.

Here are a few..

Media resources: Concerencing? Will this site be doign any conferencing? How many sessions?

                           Transcoding? Do you need transcoding for any purpose?

PRI---How many channels do you want on the gateway?

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[daviddperez09]

They will need the ability to conference, but i believe they currently never have more then 2 - 3 on going sessions.

i forgot to mention our nyc site currently has a full PRI. We would use transcoding betweens sites over the WAN.

NYC is a small office so there would never be more then 4 - 5 active calls between LA and NYC.

oh and they have 2 fax machines that would need to be connected to the gateway