IP Telephony and fax questions

[coletemple]

Dear all,

I have a customer who has a design for its IP Telephony system (centralized design over a WAN) which will be running:

- CCME at the main site with a Cisco 3845 router (cluster of 2 routers)

- Cisco Unity Express for voice mail features (cluster of 2).

At the branch site, we are putting in place a Cisco 2851 router with a SRST licence.

The customer is asking to have a fax connected at the 3845 and 2851 routers. My questions is : what is currently the best option for him using a fax on these routers, and what should I prepare as an equipment ? (fax machine, what port on the router to use, shall I purchase an adapter for the fax machine to use fax on these routers, etc).

How can I implement a fax to email for him ?

Thanks for your ideas about this design and guidance.

[James Hawkins · Accepted solution]

I am not sure that your design is correct. CUCME does not support clustering and SRST is for providing remote site resilience for CUCM rather than CUCME.

To answer your fax question you need some FXS ports in your gateways to connect analog fax machines to. Alternatively you can use a standalone gateway from the VG200 series to provide FXS ports.

If you just want fax support and are not bothered about supporting existing fax machines you could deploy an IP fax solution. There are lots available. StoneFax is a reasonable option.

http://www.imagicle.com/Products/IPFaxServer/StoneFax/tabid/222/language/en-US/Default.aspx

[coletemple]

Hi James,

Many thanks for your answers. In fact, this design is something we are planning to do. I may have made that mistake about the CCME and custering. Anyway, we would like to put a resiliency option at the headquarter, that's why we were thinking about the clustering of all the cisco call Managers.

What would your design be, for let say a headquarter and 4 branches ?  I thought that a centralized model will suit my need with CCME at the main site and SRST routers at the branch.

Any hint would be helpful. I will start checking the clustering option on these routers.

Since that the design will be deployed in a new site, I think that I'll go for an IP fax solution like suggested and explore the possibilites.