Question about Single Conductor to VCS cluster

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

I'm just configuring Conductor for the first time as per the guide found here:

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/telepresence/infrastructure/conductor/config_guide/TelePresence-Conductor-Cisco-VCS-B2BUA-Deployment-Guide-XC2-3.pdf

Given that I will be connecting to a VCS cluster with two peers, should each peer be configured as a separate location with its own Rendezvous IP address, (in which case I imagine I would add both Rendezvous IPs to the VCS neighbour zone config) or should I point to the VCS Cluster's FQDN and have a single Rendezvous IP for the whole VCS cluster?

I can't seem to see anything in the guide about it...

Thanks in advance!

[Jonathan Robb · Accepted solution]

Hi Nick,

Single Location pointing back to the VCS Cluster's FQDN.  You are correct the guide is lacking clarification, will look at opening a documentation defect for this.

- Jonathan

[Patrick Sparkman]

Jonathan -

When we setup our Conductor implementation with Cisco Advanced Services, they said the location trunk had to be a single VCS, as a VCS cluster could cause problems.  Those problems couldn't be clarified any further than "problems".  With that said, prior to them saying that, we had Conductor configured to point to the VCS cluster without issue, however as they said it "could cause problems", we reverted it back to use a single VCS instead of the cluster.

Any ideas, or thoughts on Conductor with a VCS cluster?

[Jonathan Robb]

Hi Patrick, 

I tested this out for a TAC Service Request several months ago and could not find an issue with using the FQDN for my VCS lab Cluster, I tested moving one VCS in and out of maintenance mode and then the other in and out of maintenance mode, and tested abruptly cutting them off as well one by one.   There is a severe lack of clear documentation if this is supported so there very well could be issues, I will follow up internally to confirm.

- Jonathan

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

Thanks for the replies guys... the documentation I was reading clearly statated that yoyu could point it to a cluster, it just wasn't clear exactly how to do it (although Jonathan cleared that up for us).

I'll update this with my results once I've finished testing with our VCS cluster

[Patrick Sparkman · Accepted solution]

One thing to note is depending on how your FQDN for your cluster is setup, and if it's different or the same as your SIP domain, you might have to transform the incoming search.  Either remove the domain or change it to be your SIP domain.  This only applies to calls that contain a domain coming from Conductor to the VCS such as H323 only aliases without a domain configured.

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

Yep - I got it working to the cluster, I've essentially got a search rule as follows:

(my numeric dial plan)(@.*)?

Replace with:

\1@my-sip-domain.com

This catches calls to both numeric-only strings as well as to calls to the incorrect SIP domain.