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Quick question - do the Expressway-C/E support H.323?

Chris Swinney
Level 5
Level 5

Hi All,

Just a quickie. As we don't deploy the Expressway-C/E licensing on the VCS for CUCM, I don't have a great understanding of what the addition of the Expressway licensing does the the fundamental operation of the VCS. Someone posted elsewhere that the Expressway no longer supports H.323, but I am hesitant to believe this. I can understand that the traversal tunnel supported by the Expressway for CUCM would be SIP only, does does it then preclude and H.323 registrations and/or H.323 traversal tunnels?

 

Cheers

Chris

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Hi Chris,

MRA (collab-edge) does not require the Expressway-C/E option keys to be applied, you can turn this on in a standard VCS-C / E deployment.   You would need to make an adjustment to the SIP trunk connecting to a CUCM that is included in the MRA deployment (specifically change the listening port on the CUCM side to something other than 5060 or 5061 depending on how you deploy MRA) and point your regular neighbor zone to that new port on the CUCM.

 

The Expressway-E and Expressway-C keys are essentially a version of VCS that removes subzones for registration of endpoints and move focus to just an MRA deployment.  They exist as part of bundles associated with new CUCM deployments - BE6K etc. I would advise reaching out  your account team for more information on what that entails though.

The Traversal zone In Expressway - C / E deployments created for B2B calling (as an addition to the MRA traversal Zone) can be enabled for H.323 as well.  The use will be a little different with Expressway-E/C for H.323, you can create neighbor zones to say Voice Gateway Routers or other devices but the registration would happen elsewhere for devices.

-Jonathan

 

 

 

 

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7 Replies 7

Patrick Sparkman
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

I'm not that familiar with the Expressway series, but form little I know, it does support H323 calls, but not registrations.  If you want to register H323 devices, you'll have to do so on a VCS.

Wayne DeNardi
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Similar to Patrick's response - I'm not familiar with them either - but I wouldn't expect them to support H.323 - they're there to use with the CUCM, which is SIP, so the Expressway-Core and Expressway-Edge really only need to do SIP.  You'd then link them with a SIP tunnel from the CUCM to a VCS for any of your legacy H.323 devices to hang off of.  No devices register to the Expresswa--C/E - they register to the CUCM.  That's my current understanding anyway.  Happy to be corrected by someone in the know.

Wayne
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Wayne
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Thanks guys.

So let me get this straight. As Cisco want people to migrate to CUCM, you would in-essence need the Expressway-C/E (VCS with Expressway licence) in order to get the collaborative edge working, plus and additional "normal" VCS-C/E to support legacy equipment and a traversal solution for H.323?

CUCM doesn't really fit with our deployment model and as such I have not really looked into this technology, however at some point in the near future I will probably attempt the Cisco Certification for the Video track which of course revolves around CUCM, so will need to set something up if only in a lab just to get an understanding. Still, as the Cisco machine rolls on, its useful to get heads up on how things might have to pan out.

Hi Chris,

MRA (collab-edge) does not require the Expressway-C/E option keys to be applied, you can turn this on in a standard VCS-C / E deployment.   You would need to make an adjustment to the SIP trunk connecting to a CUCM that is included in the MRA deployment (specifically change the listening port on the CUCM side to something other than 5060 or 5061 depending on how you deploy MRA) and point your regular neighbor zone to that new port on the CUCM.

 

The Expressway-E and Expressway-C keys are essentially a version of VCS that removes subzones for registration of endpoints and move focus to just an MRA deployment.  They exist as part of bundles associated with new CUCM deployments - BE6K etc. I would advise reaching out  your account team for more information on what that entails though.

The Traversal zone In Expressway - C / E deployments created for B2B calling (as an addition to the MRA traversal Zone) can be enabled for H.323 as well.  The use will be a little different with Expressway-E/C for H.323, you can create neighbor zones to say Voice Gateway Routers or other devices but the registration would happen elsewhere for devices.

-Jonathan

 

 

 

 

You might have to have a re-think as you'll need to start looking at fitting CUCM in to your deployment model.

The future path is that the VCSes don't exist (or do, but only for the registration of the "legacy" H.323 endpoints) - everything becomes SIP and part of the CUCM environment, TMS just becomes a "scheduling" system, MCUs disappear and all multi-site conferencing is done on a TelePresence Server.  And Prime Collaboration sitting above the lot for the Provisioning and Management.  Check out Page 11 of PDF of the Paul Deppterschmidt presentation from Elevation 2014 showing the Cisco Video Architecture Roadmap.

Wayne
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Wayne
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Hi Chris

If you open fresh guide "Preferred Architecture guide for video " Revised October 2014  http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/solutions/PA/midmarket/video.pdf

you may see:page 25:

Cisco Expressway-C > Integrate with an existing internal video network that uses H.323.

Cisco Expressway-E> Enable voice and video connections to other organizations using SIP or H. 323 on the internet.  

Cisco Expressway-E> Provide interworking between protocols (between SIP and H.323) for bussiness-to-bussiness communications.

br Oleksandr

Cheers all. This is a long and torturous road ahead, but In the short to mid turn, I doubt anything will change on our part. The first thing that need to change is my knowledge to the technology, hence the video certification track.

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