Cisco IM&P Federation with Skype 4 Business via Expressway

Starting with Cisco IM&P 11.5 SU2 and Expressway 8.9.1 Cisco introduced the feature in a preview state for  IM&P federation to Skype 4 Business via SIP/SIMPLE. Before it was only possible to do a XMPP federation with other Cisco IM&P customers or third party XMPP servers.

On Expressway the SIP/SIMPLE packets are handled like Calls. For this reason we need to create a new Zone pointing to our IM&P Servers and create some Search rules. Between Internet, Expressway-E and Expressway-C I reused my configuration for B2B calls.

Expressway-C:

1. Create a new Neighbor Zone pointing to your IM&P Cluster

2.  Create a Search Rule for the new Zone. We are only match on MS SIP IM&P calls which are arriving from our Expressway-E B2B Traversal Zone. Make sure to set the priority lower as for the Zone pointing to your CCM for B2B Videocalls.

3. For outgoing Calls to the Internet I reuse my B2B Search Rule pointing to the Expressway-E Zone

Expressway-E:

Make sure to route SIP MS IM&P for you Domain to your Expressway-C. In a default B2B configuration you should have a Search Rule for everything matching your Domain pointing to the Expressway-C Zone and for anything else a Rule point to your DNS Zone. This configuration is good for MS IM&P calls too. So no special configuration necessary.

Cisco IM&P Server:

This is the biggest configuration part of this setup.

1. Create a new Incoming ACL entry for your Expressway-C. It’s important to use the IP address at this point. (System > Security > Incoming ACL)

2. Enable the SIP Proxy for Presence and set the preferred Listener to Default Cisco SIP Proxy TCP Listener(Presence > Routing > Settings).

3. Unfortunately you have to configure every federated domain manually in the IM&P Server at the moment.

Starting with the SIP Federated Domains (Presence > Interdomain Federation > SIP Federation)

Afterward you have to create the routing for this Domains pointing to Expressway-C(Presence > Routing > Static Routes):

Licensing:

Reduced Rich Media Session License on Expressway

Starting with 8.8 you only need to have one RMS license in the Expressway-E for each B2B call instead of one in the -C and one in the -E.

This part is a little bit hidden in the Release Notes Guide:

Calls from registered systems to all other systems will use one RMS license, on the exit node, whenever those calls require the Expressway to process the media streams. This includes, but is not limited to, the following call types:

• Business to business calls (previously used two RMS licenses)

Source: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/expressway/release_note/Cisco-Expressway-Release-Note-X8-8.pdf

CUCM registered Endpoints count for this as registered systems.

 

When you upgraded to 8.8 you can test it if you just delete the RMS license key in the -C, it should still work. If not you can just re enter the same key and try to figure out the problem. If it’s working ask licensing@cisco.com for a rehosting of your Expressway-C RMS to your Expressway-E for a free doubling of your B2B sessions.

 

 

New UDS Port for Jabber 11.6

That’s the stuff we really like with cisco, changing essential configuration without any big announcement.

Luckily a friend told me about this:

 

Starting with Jabber 11.6(all Clients) it will use Port 443 instead of 8443. This include also the _cisco-uds SRV Record.

Best practice is of course to open both ports in the firewall.

 

 

 

Jabber “Use my computer for calls” button disappear

If you run into problems where Jabber can’t switch from Deskphone CTI to Softphone because the Softphone Option just disappear after a second, you probably hit a defect which even isn’t known by TAC. At least no one there was able to solve it in the last two month.

You can fix that for a short time with restarting the CTI Service. But that solves it only for a few days or weeks, depending on your system. To permanently solve this issue you have to rename your Jabber Devices from CSFpetersmith to CSFPETERSMITH or CSF1234 (only numbers, probably the DN).

Interestingly small letters are already forbidden by CUCM for Mobile Devices, but not for PC Clients.

Personally I prefer the small letters naming because you can easily read the username, but avoiding this problem is the better deal.

Cisco ISR G2(2900/3900) video conferencing and transcoding depreciation

Cisco just announced that with IOS 15.5(3)M the video conferencing and transcoding function will be disabled and removed for the ISR G2 Devices with PVDM2. Which include the 2900 and 3900 Series.

All customers need to migrate to 5300 MCU, or what I will recommend my customers to vTS Servers.

There is no technical reason to use a 5300 MCU for Ad-Hoc Videoconferencing compared to vTS. You can register the Conductor directly as MediaRessource to CUCM without the need for a TMS.

 

And with that change there is no difference anymore between PVDM3 and the new PVDM4 for the ISR4000 Series.

 

You will find the official announcement here: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/unified-communications/tdm-gateways/bulletin-c25-735945.html

Cisco IM&P : Changing the Jabber ID (JID) to URI

One of the interesting part of the new Jabber 10.6 is the ability to have different Jabber IDs. Most common scenario is to match the JID with your SIP Uri which is most probably your mail id. At the moment it looks  like this: Email and Work Phone(if you enabled URI Dialing) is the same, but the Jabber ID is in the format user id @ presence domain.

Inside your company this will only a visual problem. But as soon as you start a XMPP federation with another company all your users need to be addressed by userid@presence domain. Depending on your company policy this can look really weird

You can change the JID without loosing the contacts in your Jabber – These are the necessary steps to change the JID to match the SIP URI.

1. Check if there are users without a Directory URI which use Jabber. Open the End User Page at CUCM and search for “Directory URI” “is empty”. If you find someone, add a Directory URI or remove “Enable User for Unified CM IM and Presence (Configure IM and Presence in the associated UC Service Profile)” at the user page.

2. Stop this Services on all IMP nodes:

• Cisco Presence Engine (Feature Services)
• Cisco SIP Proxy (Feature Services)
• Cisco XCP Router (Network Services)
• Cisco Sync Agent (Network Services)
• Cisco Clien Profile Agent (Network Services)

3. Go to IMP-> Presence -> Settings -> Advanced Configuration. If all Services stopped correctly you’re now able to modify the IM Address setting. Change it to IM Address Scheme: Directory URI. This will use the Directory URI attribute which you set in CUCM at the LDAP sync.

4. Confirming all Warnings and wait… You can monitor the progress on top of the page.

 

5. Start all Services you previously stopped or just reboot the IMP Server.

6.Do get the right Results in the Jabber Directory Lookup you need to modify the jabber-config.xml

 <Policies>
<DirectoryURI>mail</DirectoryURI>
</Policies>

<Directory>
<IMAddresses use-default=”false”>
<IMAddress>mail</IMAddress>
</IMAddresses>
<SipUri>mail</SipUri>
<BDISipUri>mail</BDISipUri>
<UseSIPURIToResolveContacts>true</UseSIPURIToResolveContacts>
<BDIUseSIPURIToResolveContacts>true</BDIUseSIPURIToResolveContacts>
<UriPrefix></UriPrefix>
<BDIUriPrefix></BDIUriPrefix>
</Directory>

Be aware that you need to use Directory Lookup, UDS is not supported for this. Otherwise Jabber will find the users username@presencedomain as IM Address.

7. Verify

You user lookup should now look like this.

Troubleshooting:

After changing the JID you find some users with their old IM Address(userid@domain) which result in an error if you try to send messages or see presence.

In this case the best way around was to Remove all users from the Presence Server and add it again. You can do this with BULK-> Update Users.

Remove: “Enable User for Unified CM IM and Presence (Configure IM and Presence in the associated UC Service Profile)”

Verify in IMP that there are no more users in the DB and readd the parameter vi BULK.

Some Important notes:

– UDS Directory Lookup is not supported for individual IM-Addresses

– Be aware that you could increase the ammount of presence domains, depending on the amount of different email TLD you’ve in your directory. If you plan to use XMPP Federation you need to have all this domains in your SSL certificate.

Cisco 7821/7841 shows wrong time (GMT Timezone) regardless of configured Timezone

I recognized on a new installed CUCM11 Cluster that some phones are showing the GMT Time but where configured with a Timezone (GMT+2) as alle the other Phones.

After trying some changes like a native supported Timezone, a total different Timezone, change from 24 to 12hour format nothing changed on the particular phones. All other phones showed the new configuration.

A Reset over the menu doesn’t helped to. So I tried a factory reset of the keypad, and this finally did it. Phone rebooted several times and showed the correct time.

So the factory reset procedure for the 78XX is:

Step 1	Unplug the phone: If using PoE, unplug the LAN cable. If using the power cube, unplug the power cube.
Step 2	Wait 5 seconds.
Step 3	Press and hold # and plug the phone back in.
Step 4	When the phone boots up, the headset button, the speaker button, and the mute button light up. When the light on the Mute button turns off, press 123456789*0# in sequence. When you press 1, the lights on the headset button turns off. The light on the Select button flashes when a button is pressed. After you press these buttons, the phone goes through the factory reset process. If you press the buttons out of sequence, the phone powers on normally. Caution    Do not power down the phone until it completes the factory reset process, and the main screen appears.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cuipph/7811-7821-7841-7861/10-1/english/adminguide/PA2D_BK_7479E876_00_7811-7821-7841-7861-ag-cucm-1031/PA2D_BK_7479E876_00_7811-7821-7841-7861-ag-cucm-1031_chapter_01110.html#PA2D_TK_P0663CEF_00

Slow Disk Performance on BE6000 UCS C220 M4 Server

I just installed two of new BE6k UCS C220M4 HD Servers with a colleague as we recognized a very poor perfomance of the server. After verifying all the Firmware of the Server and Controller and VMware drivers were uptodate my colleague checked the Raid configuration for the Virtual Disk and recognized that the Raid configuration is for a Raid 0/1 and not for the default Raid 5 which is setup by Cisco(Thanks to Jurgen Waldl for that quick find). After changing this values we got our Performance back.

We found this configuration on three M4 Servers.

Verify your actual configuration:

Login to CIMC, go to Storage -> Virtual Drive Info

If Write Cache Policy is set to Writhe Through and the Disk Cache Policy is disabled you have the wrong configuration.

1. Enter the Raid Controller Menu during Boot

2. Select the Virtual Drive and choose F2

3. Go to Advanced Setting

4. Change the Values

• “Default Write” to “Write Back”
• “Disk cache Policy” to “Enable”

This are the recommended settings by Cisco:

(http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/whitepaper_c11-728200.html)

99XX Phones, Softkeys and Feature Control Policy

You always needed to have a Feature Control Policy for the 99xx Phones to modify the Sofkteys instead of the Softkey Template which is used by everyone else.

With CUCM 10.5 you have now the ability to change it back to Softkey Template for the 99xx Phones. Finally you can modify the order of the Buttons 🙂

Go to the Product Specific Configuration Layout, either at the Phone Level oder Common Phone Profile or Enterprise Phone Configuration and scroll all the way down. Close to the bottom you’ve now the option “Softkey Control”

Road to Jabber 10.6

Last week during Cisco Live Europe Cisco published the new 10.6 Jabber version for all platforms with some great enhancements.

Some of this enhancements are not only related to the client/enduser site but also effect the server:

– Check of CUCM certificates for CTI Control

– Jabber User ID

I will start with the check of the CUCM certificate for CTI Control of Deskphone. Until 10.5 Jabber checks only the CUCM and IMP tomcat, the IMP XMPP and if used the CUC tomcat certificate. With 10.6 cisco announced to check now for the CUCM Callmanager certificate, too.

Which becomes a big thing for a lot of customers sine the 10.6 Jabber Update can’t no rolled out before all CUCM nodes get their certificate which result in a maintenance windows.

Just two days ago Cisco announced to remove this certificate check with Jabber 10.6.1.