Advanced SIP Registration for CUCM

Welcome back.

In the previous lecture we worked on basic SIP registration with one softphone.

In this lecture we’ll integrate multiple Q-SYS softphones with a real SIP proxy to get a deeper

understanding of the typical setup of the proxy itself and what we need to know about that

setup to be successful in registering and making calls.

In an advanced setup CUCM supports registering up to 8 softphones per device.  

We’ll discuss this more a bit later.

A quick review of the basic topology of a typical VoIP deployment is shown above.

Everything here stays the same when we are working with multiple softphones instead of only one.

Keep in mind the topology here is greatly simplified from an  

actual enterprise VoIP deployment,

but the basic concepts shown here should apply to any running CUCM implementation.

The steps will be as follows:

Again, the first step for most SIP telephony endpoints is to register with the SIP proxy.

In this case, CUCM checks the credentials of each endpoint and responds accordingly.

The endpoints can make calls when and only when they’re registered with the call manager.

We’ll discover that different methods are required to interface Q-SYS to CUCM

depending on the number of Q-SYS softphones required in your project.

Previously we focused on one softphone only.

In this workshop we are going to focus on multiple softphone registration.

In a future workshop we will address SIP trunk integration.

Next we will configure a system with multiple softphones.

The steps to configure this are similar but  

slightly different in CUCM and for the Q-SYS Softphone.

First we create the Security profile that will be used for the Softphones.

This is shared by all of the softphones.

Next we create the End User profile that includes the  

credentials the softphones will use to register.

These credentials are shared by all of the softphones.

Finally we create the phone definition which consists of a Device  

and the associated Directory Numbers.

The Directory Numbers are the phone numbers used for the softphones.

Let’s look at each step in detail…

When multiple softphones are required in a Q-SYS design  

they need to be registered as “Third-party SIP Device (Advanced).

As before the very first part of defining the softphones in CUCM  

is to create a ‘Phone Security Profile’.

We can skip the details of each field as we saw them in our previous workshop.

The ‘User ID’ in the end user setup corresponds  

to the authentication username in the Q-SYS softphone setup.

This User ID will be shared by multiple softphones in this setup.

Again the authentication password is set in the ‘Digest Credentials’ field.

The password will be shared among all of the softphones as well.

The final step is to configure a phone device of the correct type tied to that user account.

We see here the device is set up as an advanced third-party SIP device.

We also see here how multiple directory numbers will be associated to the same device.

Here we see the device type again showing it is configured as Advanced.

As we saw in the basic setup we also need to add a Digest User on the Device screen.

This will match what we configured earlier. In this example it would be ‘QSYS1’.

In the Protocol Specific Information at the bottom of this page,

we assign the device security profile we created for an Advanced phone.

The SIP Profile will be the same as it was for a basic phone.

The very last element to tie in the directory numbers associated with this account.

In this case, you can see that we have four directory numbers assigned

and 4 spaces for additional directory numbers if needed later.

On the core side most things remain the same except that for each softphone  

you want to configure it to use a different username.

This will correspond to the directory numbers that were configured in the previous step on CUCM.

For example, if we had 4 softphones the Usernames might be 1001, 1002, 1003, and 1004.

The Authentication ID and Password will all be the same.

Now if we go back to the core we should see all 4 of our softphones registered.

One of the common issues that sometimes occurs  

is that the extensions are setup as basic and not advanced.

Recall back to our earlier slide where we setup a ‘Third Party SIP Device (Advanced)’.

If for some reason we accidentally configured our extensions as a Basic device instead  

we’d see something strange happen.

One line will register but the other will stay in fault.

Then you might see the other line register and the first one fault.

Why?

Because a Basic device only allows one line to register.

If we go back to CUCM and change it to Advanced then it should work again!

At this point you should be able to open  

each softphone and see the same ‘OK’ status as before when we only had one.

You also can try to place a test call from each softphone.

You can even call one softphone from the other.

That’s it.

At this point you should have multiple softphones registered to your CUCM.

Stay tuned for our last workshop where we will discuss sip trunking.