Virtual office (CS1000)

Some people ask me about how to configure Virtual office feature and how it is licensed.

CS1000 Virtual office feature is basically an analog of Cisco Hoteling mode, that allows phone profile portability for Avaya CS1000 IP phones.

I think the main reason for all these questions is that because official documentation is quite complicated on this matter and that may cause some confusion. So, this is why 2 years ago I created a document explaining how to implement this feature in simple words (at least I believe so :).

Here is the link for those who is interested.

Configuring Virtual Office

Callpilot password

Cool link for those who lost Callpilot default password for user 000000.

http://pbxbook.com/vmail/callpilot/cprpwd.html

Avaya LAB on VMWare

Apparently you can install almost whole suite of Avaya Aura products on VMWare, it is not a secret.

But officially until release of Avaya Aura 7 you still need Media gateway (even if you need SIP-only solution). You can buy cheapest one, something like G.430.  And I'm not talking about production environment.

But what if you want to build Avaya lab and don't want to spend money on gateways?

There is unofficial solution for this problem:

1) Install Avaya CM 6.x on VMWare.  Assign IP address to it (for example 192.168.0.10)

2) Temporarily shutdown Avaya CM vm

3) Install System Platform 6.x on VMWare

4) Install MBT 5.2.1 template with Media services

5) When you will be installing MBT assign to CM 5.2.1 the same IP that you assigned previously to CM 6.

6) At some point during installation you are asked to add gateways. Add G.650 and assign ip addresses

(IPSI, medpro etc...).

7) When the installation of MBT is finished you can disable all templates except Media services (named COBAR).

8) Start your Avaya CM 6.x  and start configuring G.650 as if it is a real hardware component

9) Now you can establish SIP trunk between CM and SM, register H.323 phones, play announcements etc..

Thanks to people who discovered that feature:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1729440

Basically Media services is the emulation of hardware gateways. 

This method is not suitable for production environment, and also you still need licenses otherwise it will only work 30 days. But for lab and learning - why not?

For testing purposes I installed - CM, SM, SMGR, AES, Unity, CMM,CMS, AAEP on only one hardware server with VMWare ESXi. It is slow, but enough speed to test software features and practice in installing Avaya software.