Jabber 10.5 on VDI with VXME

[Yannick Vranckx]

Hi Guys,

Abit of a longer scenario and some good questions for this.

We have a customer with a VDI environment who has Cisco Unified Communications platform (Call Manager & Cisco Contact Center express)

They are currently on version 7 but we will upgrade them to version 9, all of that is already done, the new call manager with 10.5 UCCX is already setup and running. It's running at the moment next to the older version in the same subnet and we are waiting to transfer over people.

But we have hit a snag in the pipe, namely the VDI environment, the actual servers are located in a data center while the people ofcourse sit in an office some miles out.

So the VDI servers together with the Call Manager & Contact Center Express servers are in a data center and the users + thin clients are in the LAN environment. So the problem now is that our media stream (Voice, soon video) is passing that data center, because it will set up the stream between a local thin client & hosted virtual desktop inside the data center and then back out again to reach another client.

As i know, Cisco released a piece of software called VXME, which has 2 sides: The engine & The utilities, you install the engine on the thin client and the utilities on the HVD, simple as that it seems. Well i've read alot of the documentation and there is some of it, mainly high level, there is no exact document describing how the VXME sees this traffic or even catches it from a thin client, because all sorts of questions have risen up during meetings with the client.

The local LAN is setup with VRF's, one for Data & Voice. Since a Jabber will register with a "data vlan" ip and not a voice vlan, we are concerend with how the communication will flow from a Jabber client to a physical phone for example. The VRF's are ended in that data center so my guess is it will flow towards that data center and end there, making the exact same "faulty" loop that we have now.

Another questions is, how does this work for a "BYOD" policy, for example a user brings in his laptop with Vmware view installed to get to a HVD in the VDI. Do we then have to tell the customer to install a VXM Engine on every laptop to? because it will act as the thin client.

Does anyone have any working experience with this, i've read alot of the VXME documents with the high level cisco design and how "easy" everything is portrayed inside nice slides but no real hard configuration data with how the VXME will detect the audio and direct it good and what with mixed IPphone & Client

Thanks

[Yannick Vranckx]

Any other people looking for this answer, it is found after some research and some testing.

Cisco VXME is a piece of software that many UC vendors have, it helps you to keep the media flow local between thin clients instead of sending it to the data center together with the signalling.

In the case of a vmware environment the VXM Engine will send the media through the pcoip tunnel that is created towards the other thin client that is being called, because they sit in the same subnet.

The signalling is sent towards the Call Manager and the VDI server in the data center, when a user brings his laptop to work and connects to the VDI with that laptop it becomes the thin client and VXME needs to be active or the Jabber needs to be installed locally. 

If you have VRF's configured on the local network and they only merge in the data center, you will have to use VRF linking or get a thin client that can support multi vlan. The actual stuff VXME sends is together with the pcoip protocol for vmware and the one for citrix. We have tested this and the Jabber client on the hosted desktop is aware of the installed engine on the thin client thanks to the utilities. The utilties has a small event viewer to check for possible errors but to check if the process is actually running you will need the task manager access from the thin client to see if VXME is doing what it supposed to be doing.

The customer said that he didn't like installing anything on the thin client but after more research, all of the big UC vendors do it like this. It's even a recommendation from the VDI vendors.

[aniiyer]

Do you have any documentation you can share based on your deployment? 

[machorar]

HI Yannick,

Could you please share any documents with more details on the topic ?

Thanks,
Manish