VG410 analogue gateway ports locking

[JamesHawkins]

Hi,

I have configured a VG410 48 port gateway for use with CUCM. The CUCM cluster does not support the VG410 as an SCCP gateway so I have configured it as a SIP device and pointed a CUCM SIP trunk to it.

Calls seem to work ok but after a seemingly random period the phones connected to the FXS ports just hear re-order tone. It is not possible to dial between analogue phones connected to FXS ports on the gateway or to devices connected via the SIP trunk to CUCM.

Rebooting the gateway resolves the issue but it reoccurs after an hour or so.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to troubleshoot this? The gateway is currently running 17.12.04

Normally I would set the gateway up as SCCP but that would require an upgrade of CUCM to v14 SU3 or later which is not possible at the moment. 

[JamesHawkins]

Hello, I am still seeing this issue with the 410 gateways and have tried four different software releases.

The gateways will work ok for several days but then the ports lock up. I have raised a TAC case but have not really had much useful feedback.

The VG410 does not have physical DSP chips - instead it uses virtual DSPs running on the main CPU. I think that this may be the root cause of the issue.

Has anyone else deployed VG410 gateways? If yes have they been working properly and would you be willing to share some info about software version and some configuration information?

[Alan Brown]

Hi, we are having a similar issue as we have just deployed a 24-port VG410 connected to CUCM via MGCP. Gateway and ports are registered in CUCM, sh ccm-manager shows gateway registered to CUCM but ports seem to been in a PLO status. We are running Dublin 17.12.04a to match our VG420 and VG450, also configured as MGCP gateways. 

We have not tried different software versions given that we are running the same version across other VG4X0 gateways with success.  I'm concerned about the virtual DSP's as the other gateways have the physical DSP chips.  

[JamesHawkins]

Hi Alan, as mentioned the gateways I set up were configured as SIP. After opening a TAC case and go through a few engineers - one of whom told me to make sure the DSP chips were properly inserted!!! - I spoke to a guy who recommended turning off SIP Options ping on both the VG410 and the CUCM SIP trunk connecting to it. This seems to have made the gateways a lot more stable.
This probably won't be much help to you if you are using MGCP but may be to others.

Good luck and please post any progress updates. 

[JamesHawkins]

So today after posting the above one of the VG410 gateways I deployed failed again.

I am not sure whether it is worth raising another TAC case. I was thinking about upgrading CUCM so that the gateway is natively supported as MGCP or SIP gateway rather than having it configured as a SIP device but, given Alan's experiences, that seems unlikely to solve the issue.

I think the virtual DSP technology is unreliable and that Cisco have very little focus on this device - they do not even bother with release notes when a new software version is released.

Right now buying some VG224's off ebay is looking like an attractive option!

Apologies for the rant - I had hoped I had resolved my issues with this box!

[Alan Brown]

Hi James, we have recently upgraded to CUCM 15.X, and upgraded the new
VG410 to match our IOS XE on our existing VG450 and VG420 which are on
compatible IOS for CUCM 15.X, and also configured as MGCP gateways. I
re-read the following Cisco doc and ran the "show voice dsp group all"
command and the DSP seemed to be in a perpetual downloading state with no
active version installed.

Running the command "voice vdsp install" seemed to have fixed the problem
with the ports. This gateway has only been in service for a day, so I'll
provide an update if we have any future problems down the road.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/access/vg410/software-configuration/vg410-software-config-guide/configuring-vg410-software-dsp.html