webex calling migration design question.

[vijayS]

Hi Guys,

i was hoping someone can shed  some light as i have few design questions.

currently we have a customer (college), main campus with few remote campus using CUCM.  all PSTN calls (except 911) goes to the GW at the main campus.  remote campuses have Gateways with few analog lines (FXO) and used only for 911. so remote campuses' 911 calls exit via their respective local GW.  now if i have to migrate them to webex calling, my questions are

1.  how do i achieve the same calling design?.  PSTN calls via main campus and 911 via remote GW.  because i will have to create location for each campus and associate their respective local GW under location.  in webex, pstn calls exit via their respective location specified GWs only.  even if i create a route group, put their respective 911 local GW on top followed by main campus GW, then all calls will first try to reach out to local GW and then fails over to main campus GW (as the local GW will only have dial peers for 911 and no other calls). this is probably not the best design( because we are sending a non-emergency to a GW that meant to reject, logs will pile up and the reports will show each rejection)

2. during a phase migration, is there a way to migrate all users at once, and set the users who are not part of this phase to inactive/disable state and only activate users who are part of the phase (specific site users)? in that way, when webex users dial an extension of a user who is yet to be migrated, i want the call to go LGW ->CUCM->user..  )(CUCM is capable of this approach. all we have to do is put the extension in a temp_pt and make sure this pt is not part of any CSS so its isolated. wondering if webex has any approach).  I know that i can migrate users per device pool during cucm bat file import into webex.

thanks

Vijay S

[vijayS]

we are in Canada.  that helps. thanks for your feedback.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Are these locations in the USA? If yes, Cisco includes RedSky Horizon Mobility to satisfy E911 statutory requirements. This should allow you to route the emergency calls directly through Cisco/RedSky instead of the LGW, at which point you can just have a single central LGW covering all locations. Canada is also supported by RedSky but Cisco isn't covering the cost there. It's likely worth the incremental cost to simplify things though.

If not, and you're actually forced to route all of these calls through a LGW, the next idea would be chaining the gateways together: WxC-MT -> branch LGW -> SIP dial peers -> main campus CUBE -> PSTN (and vice versa). As far as WxC-MT is concerned, it would have a single PSTN path for all calls at each location. It wouldn't know/care how it's handled after that. The two potential downsides I see to that are: 1) additional CUBE license consumption; and, 2) if users are working remotely, audio has to hairpin through their local site. This design has an upside as well though: it would make implementing site survivability a lot easier, if that's a requirement. The Survivability Gateway (SGW) function can be co-resident with the Local Gateway (LGW). If Webex Calling is unreachable but the branch LGW can still reach the main campus CUBE, external calling would still work. If the main campus CUBE is also unreachable, local dial-peers could use the FXO ports instead.

Unfortunately WxC-MT doesn't have an option to provision users with their ESN & DID but leave them in an inactive state until the cut window. You may want to submit or upvote an enhancement request (Cisco/partner or customer) though.