Neighboring Cisco VCS with Polycom VBP

[Martin Bieak]

Hi,

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place in trying to firgure out a way to nieghbor a VCS with a Polycom VBP. 

My current company set up is as follows:

VCS-E - Firewall - VCS-C

I have endpoints registered to both the VCS-E and VCS-C pending on their location and internet connectivity.  If the endpoints are on network behind company firewalls they are registered to the VCS-C.  If they are off network they are registered to VCS-E.

We just absorded another company that has a Polycom VBP and the equipment has just been installed and suites their needs.  I would like to neighbor the two systems together so both sites can user either four or six digit dialing without changing their gatekeeper address. The site with the VCS can call the Polycom system but only stays connected for 30sec and then disconnects. The site with the polycom has to then call back on the registered E.164 address and then the call is stable.

I have asked around and the majority of folks stated if the two sites could be neighbored it would cut out the firewall issue and it would be direct path call. 

My questions is, is it possible to neighbor the two together?

[Martin Koch]

At least I do not see a real reason why it should not be possible to neighbor them.

The biggest challenge might be the network, if you use a neighborzone you need

many ports open in between all involved components, endpoints, vcs, vbp,

for signaling and media.

There should be no NAT  or any layer3 modifiers present and the firewalls need to

allow all the ports.

Unless you can not guarantee that (on integrated additional companies the open and

transparent routed network is often the issue) you are better of with a VCS-E to

be able to make a traversal zone in betwen the two locations to bind signaling and

media in between these two.

Most enterprise firewalls have some h323 or sip features enabled by default which

can break communication and cause issues like you reported.

I also heard of people trying to use a SBC, but that might get quite complex as you exactly

have to know how signaling works to not mess things up and know how to trouble shoot.

[Martin Bieak]

Thanks for the response back.  All the inbound ports are open for the VCS-E for inbound traffic.  We did find a couple of ports that were not open for outbound which caused an error "Channel unspecified" when the VCS tried to connect to the VBP.  From my understanding its a routing issues where the path cannot be estabalished both ways. 

I know that both networks are being routing differently there has been issues in the past with other VCS's in trying to connect to the VBP.  Since both networks work off of Verizon's MPLS network and from my understanding could the juniper routers striping the H323 and SIP packet and reforming them?

I noticed when setting up the neighbor zone there is an advance setting for preset devices.  I am assuming I would do a custom config for the VBP and not an infrastructure setting or can it stay at a default setting?