Is Anyone using Polycom SIP phones on Avaya CM / System Mgr.? 2

[learningSkype]

Hi all, is anyone on this forum using Polycom SIP phones, such as VVX400 or VVX500 or CX600, etc. in their Avaya environment? We want to add Polycom to our System Mgr. and am putting this out to see what kind of feedback I can get from anyone that has already tried this approach. What were your steps, was it just programming in System Manager or did you need additional hardware, patches, other?

 

[kyle555]

I mostly have experience with the IP5000 conference sets, but they work fine.

My feedback would be to use FQDN for your SM clusters because the Polycoms I've worked with only seem to let you have 1 registrar - so it'd need to be a DNS thing that resolves to 2 SMs if you want redundancy.

And, I'd say you want a way to manage all the Polycoms and their config files and however they work. Avaya SIP phones use something called "advanced sip telephony" where they can automagically have config changes pushed out to them. Consider how you'd do that across a gaggle of Polycoms for a config change or updating security certificates.

 

[learningSkype]

Thanks. Good point on the dual registrars. I sent that over to my vendor for further research.

 

[kyle555]

Yeah, so the Polycom's will never simultaneously register to 2 SMs as far as I know, but at least having the FQDN resolve to 2 SM IPs will let them failover if required.

Also, because they're not AST devices, they can't get profile information from CM with all the feature keys CM uses. I think you'd be reduced to the features in SIPPING 19 and you'd need to use something called feature name extensions in CM.

Basically, feature name extensions are dialable numbers assigned to features - like call forwarding. So, you'd need to configure a key on the Polycom to dial that number, and then label it in the Polycom config. This is stuff that's all automatic on Avaya SIP phones.

Depending on what you want to do, it would probably be easier to manage and more feature rich to use Avaya SIP phones.

 

[learningSkype]

Kyle, thanks for your help.

How do you actually get into the Polycom phones, physically? I received one today and have my network port ready, cable is plugged in and the phone has booted, waiting for me to take next steps. Now I need to access the phone and there is nothing on the Polycom site that tells me how to do get into the management side of the phone so I can work on the config file, tell the phone where to register, etc.

 

[kyle555]

I was using conference phones. They have a native web interface. I'm sure there's some design like Avaya phones to have it pull a config file like macadrress.cfg or something.

 

[ZeroZeroOne]

Polycom has done a reasonable job of using similar firmware on all their phones so if you're used to the IP 5000 then you should be able to find your way around any handset.

Manual programming for Polycom phones can be accomplished via the on-phone menu or by accessing the on-board Web sever via the IP Address of the phone.
You can find the IP Address of a new phone by logging in and looking under Menu/Status/Network/TCP/IP Parameters

Enter that IP Address into your web browser and you should now have access to the phone by logging in with the same admin password.

Depending on the version of firmware you may or may not be able to upload a config file to the phone. For IP 5000 or IP 7000 I would strongly recommend version 4.0.8 or higher for just that reason.

To get a Polycom phone up and running quickly use the Simple Setup where you can set:
[ul]
[li]Language[/li]
[li]Time Synchronization (SNTP server)[/li]
[li]SIP Server {Session Manager)[/li]
[li]SIP Outbound Proxy (if required)[/li]
[li]SIP Line Identification[/li]

[li]Display Name User Name [/li]
[li]Address (Extension)[/li]
[li]Authentication User ID (Extension)[/li]
[li]Authentication Password (SIP profile password)[/li]
[li]Label (I use "[extension], name")[/li]
[/ul]​

On the phone web interface, go to Settings / Provisioning Server to set the location for backup/restore files. I use the same Linux server as the 96xx series phones with a different directory. So my server address looks like "servername/polycom"

Backup file names are either [macaddress]-phone.cfg or [macaddress]-web.cfg. Phones also create [macaddress]-boot.log and [macaddress]-appFlash.log when booted and upgraded, respectively.

Once you have a working phone that registers correctly to ASM, you can download the file to your PC and copy it for other phones.
Change the name to match the MAC Address of the new phone
Edit the file and find the User Name, Extension, password, and Phone Label and replace with the new values. Be sure to find all instances of the name and extension.
Log into your new phone and upload this new config file. The phone will reboot and have the same server settings as the first with the new user information.

If you will be rolling out a lot of phones then I would recommend setting a DHCP option for Polycoms similar to Option 242 for the 96xx Avaya phones. I don't remember the specific numbers but Polycom will look at at least four separate options when it boots up. We selected 166:

Name: Polycom SIP Options
Datatype: String
Code: 166
Description: Provisioning for Polycom SIP Phones
String:

http://phonebackup/polycom

Polycom phones will then boot up and will look for their [macaddress] config file in the correct location.

I hope that helps.