VCS Interworking IPv4/IPv6

[cecile gallien]

Hello Everybody,

I am challenged at a customer's who is deploying IPv6 for video with VCS Control to do Interworking IPv6/IPv4. I need to validate the design to be sure that Interworking is done as expected by Network team at customer's.

As I understand Interworking (at least for H323-SIP) it is the VCS the closest to the EP that needs to interwork that supports the interworking.

So in any design with VCS supporting both IPv4 and IPv6, interworking could occur on any VCS depending on the direction of the call.

This point is very critical to my customer : he wants always the same VCS do the interworking.

I attach the infrastructure that is deployed and I would like to be sure how media is routed when interworking IPv4 to IPv6.

The idea of the customer is to get an environment

- Zone 1 : IPv6 only where VCS and video systems communicate only over IPv6

- Zone 2 : IPv4 and IPv6 where VCS handles video systems IPv6 or IPv4

- Neighbor Zone between Zone 1 and Zone 2 in IPv6 only

The aim of the design is to get interworking ONLY on VCS that handles IPv6 and IPv4 and no interworking at all on VCS in Zone 1 IPv6 only. This is question of bandwidth that VCS in Zone 1 is limited to so routing the media would overflow the network.

I did not find in the VCS how to disable IPv4-IPv6 interworking as this can be done for H323-SIP Interworking (there is a menu for this) so I hope I can deal with such a design. The idea is to force interworking on VCS in Zone 2 ONLY.

I take any other suggestion of design or configuration of VCS that guarantees interworking only on VCS in Zone 2 would the call come from Zone 1 or Zone 2.

Thanks for any answer you could provide me on any point of this topic, mainly if I get wrong on understanding how interworking works or on configuration on VCS.

Regards,

Cécile

[Wayne DeNardi · Accepted solution]

IPv4 - IPv6 Interworking would only happen on a device that has both IPv4 and IPv6 available/active, so in your diagram, that'd be on the VCS in your mixed zone (Zone 2), not in the IPv6 only zone, so it should work as you're wanting it to.

Wayne
--
Please remember to rate responses and to mark your question as answered if appropriate.

[cecile gallien]

Hello Wayne,

Thanks for your time and reply. It seems to be as I expected. I should be able to test it in a few weeks with my customer and if I notice something different, I would notify the forum.

Cécile

[Martin Koch]

Interworking can only happen if two protocols are present ;-)

But it will be interesting to hear how it goes in that deployment, so even if it goes

fine, just report which things you noticed.

How is your setup, will you have a cluster somewhere? Wonder if clustering

is not properly supported on IPV6 (dual stack or only). As well as how to

properly define neigbor and traversal zones, I guess you would need to add

both ips and make different zones.

(but you only seem to have non clustered vcs - with one zone - with one ip protocol)

[cecile gallien]

Hello Martin,

Thanks for your reply. You have some very revelant questions.

Indeed the VCS in IPv4/IPv6 should be a cluster. I have not yet configured it though that way. Can a cluster be configured as dual stack ? No, I don't think so because I would need configure for each peer the v4 and v6 address in cluster configuration. This means that my cluster can only be 3 peers then ?  I guess you build the cluster on a single strack and with VCS dual stack, using v4 addresses build the cluster on v4 and doing it with v6, makes the cluster v6. There are no restrictions of clusters with dual stack in cluster deployment guide. Now the true question is : if I have a cluster in v4 and doing a call in v6 will there be an interworking due to the cluster stack ? Or the cluster is only an exchange of information between peers and has nothing to do with call protocols ?

I read in the Release note of version X8.1 that cluster is now working. I would test it in my environment or at customers, depending, which network is first ready.

For neighbors, from v6 VCS I can only declare v6 address of dual stack VCS. And it is the same, the other way round.

I will post the results I will get but don't be too impatient, because it could be a long process to reach the full environment.

Cecile