VCS upgrade to x8.1 - recommended practice for updating port ranges

[Chris Swinney]

Hi all,

There are a few posts on the upgrade to x8.1, but I couldn't quite find one on this. I thought I had posted once, but I think Cisco's "upgrade" to the forums have lost the original post (plus causing a few other issues!).

I think that the port changes (including the demultiplexing media ports) have been well documented, but what are peoples thoughts on updating the ephemeral ports after a VCS upgrade from x7.x to x.8.1 to match what would be the case if x8.1 was a new install.

I.E, the the media transfer ports are 36000–59999 on a new install (with the demultiplexing ports are 36000 and 36001), whilst on an upgrade the ports are 50000-54999 (with the demultiplexing ports are 50000 and 50001). Given that in some cases firewall rules may need to be updated, and given the additional scalability (although I don't see this as being an issue unless we are using VM deployments), it it worth updating the port ranges just to that all ranges going forward will be the same - the later point might be useful for us gave that we have multiple deployment and it just means that everything will be the same.

Thoughts please

Chris

[Wayne DeNardi]

Yes, these new look forums do seem to have some issues.  You do have another post, almost identical to this one https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12135246/vcs-upgrade-x81-recommended-practice-updating-port-ranges

We haven't made the step to X8.1 here yet due to having multiple traversal zones that connect to other agencies and the demux port issues you mentioned, but as per the other upgrades where ports changed (ie pre 7.2 to 7.2), we've upgraded the port ranges to the newer specs throughout the environment once everything was at the same level to try to prevent any future problems with installations of new VCSes which will default to the new settings.

Wayne
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[Patrick Sparkman]

We've upgraded our VCS to X8.1, unlike Wayne we don't have any external VCSs in our deployment to take into consideration.  Even though it was an upgrade as upgrades use the existing X7.x port ranges, I had our network guys open the extra ports anyway, just in case.  This is also to future proof us just in case we do a fresh install of a VCS down the road, the new ranges for new installs will already be open.

[Chris Swinney]

Hi Both,

Many thanks for the time taken to respond.

Like Wayne, we maintain a relatively large public sector VCS deployment across our country (Wales, UK), maintaining 7 point of presence with VCS Expressways that are used to peer with 50+ separate organisations. I have published comments in another thread (to which I believe you have both also posted) which relate to some discrepancies in the Cisco documentation and the seeming inability to be able to run both the VCS-E and peered VCS-C on differing versions (although our tests conclude otherwise). Still, we will be delaying the majority of our upgrades until we can can upgrade a group at a time (probably this summer).

However, in this particular situation we have a single VCS-C peering with a VCS-E, and the VCS-E hosts no other active traversal zones. We have therefore taken the opportunity to upgrade these devices to x8.1 as they will be more actively used than our previous test zone.

We too have in the past updated various port ranges on upgrades where the upgrade has diverged from the new version installation, and believe that we will do this on the rest of the x8.1 upgrades. Indeed, in this instance we have updated both the media port range and the ephemeral port ranges such that:

• Media ports: 36000 – 59999
• Ephemeral ports: 30000 – 35999.
• TURN relay ports (on VCS-E): 36000 – 59999

BTW - I will delete the doubled post - thanks Wayne, this didn't show in my notifications.

Chris