Intercluster trunk with Lync Integration

[ftsao49]

I have a customer who is looking to build a couple of intercluster trunks between 8.5 CUCM clusters.  Originally I was looking at doing a non-gatekeeper h323 trunk, but the customer has stated that they will be moving to a Lync-CUCM integration in the near future.  Question is is the h323 intercluster trunk still a viable option, and if so what do I gain or lose with a h323 trunk as opposed to a SIP intercluster trunk?

[George Thomas]

H323 trunk is still a viable option however imagine a call from Cluster A's 7945 SCCP phone to Cluster B's Lync client. It will be SCCP -> H323 -> SIP -> Lync client. Do you want all that protocol translations. I wouldnt just from a troubleshooting perspective but should work fine though.

[anuj.wadhwa]

@George: can we directly create a SIP trunk from Cluster A (CUCM) pointing to Cluster B (Lync)? Is that a viable option?

Also, when you say "SCCP -> H323 -> SIP -> Lync", what would be the configurations (Just breif).

Thanks

[Mohammed al Baqari]

You can do this if you insert CUBE which perform H323 to SIP translation. But this is a poor design.

I ideally CUCM -- SIP -- Lync is the best way of doing it.
 

[Chris Deren]

As of CUCM 8.5 Cisco's recommendation is to use SIP trunks instead of H323 ICTs between your clusters (well documented in SRND). So, my recommendation would be to convert the ICT to SIP between clusters and then have SIP trunk  (only option) to Lync server.