Call Manager to Avaya H.323 Trunk

My goal is to create a h.323 trunk between the Avaya COmmunication Manager (ACM) and our Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM).

Here is a guy who did a good job of setting up an h323 trunk on Avaya Call Manager to talk to Asterisk:

http://rblondon.blogspot.com/2008/02/set-h323-trunk-between-asterisk-and.html

It would be interesting to see if you could do a CUCM to Avaya CM h323 connection with no gateway. I don't see this anywhere.

I take that back, I found it here:
http://www.avaya.com/master-usa/en-us/resource/assets/applicationnotes/ip-trunk-cm.pdf


1/26/09 10:14AM:
I have this configuration set up, but only works one way, from Avaya to Cisco. These successful calls end up with an RTP stream between the Medpro and the Cisco phone.

I am tying to figure out why the call coming in to the Avaya is not working. My hunch is that on these calls, ACM is not recognizing the incoming IP address because the call seems to be originating from the CUCM subscriber and the trunk is currently built against the publisher.

1/26/09 4:12 PM:
OK, adding "trunk group for channel selection" field equal to my trunk group number seems to give me two-way communication. I can call from Avaya to Cisco, no problem. I can call from Cisco to any destination on the Avaya side *** except Avaya IP phones ***. Calls to Avaya digital and analog phones seem to work fine. Calls to other systems that tandem through the ACM work fine.

These calls that are terminating on Avaya IP phones error out with odd ISDN-like error messages. It just doesn't add up. I wonder if it is trying to establish a station to station link? maybe the signaling or the codec is failing. The D-Channel data is looking fine, the call seems to fail when the systems are trying to build the RTP stream.

0:35 Calling party trunk-group 50 member 1 cid 0x159
16:00:35 Calling Number & Name 32081 32081 Wes Sch
16:00:35 dial 32080
16:00:35 ring station 32080 cid 0x159
16:00:35 G711MU ss:off ps:20 rn:1/1 10.12.13.221:2758 10.12.13.103:2740
16:00:36 active station 32080 cid 0x159
VOIP data from: 10.12.13.103:274016:00:46 Jitter:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0: Buff:8 WC:0 Avg:0
16:00:46 Pkloss:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0: Oofo:0 WC:0 Avg:0
16:00:47 denial event 1197: ISDN resrc unavail/unspec D1=0x830032 D2=0x4012f
16:00:47 idle trunk-group 50 member 1 cid 0x159

I also found a link to the following document on Cisco's NetPro site:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/pbx/interop/notes/technote_h323trunk_ext.pdf

Steve suggested adding TSC on the Avaya which we did with no success. We'll have to continue on this tomorrow!


1/28/09 12:42
Still playing around a bit here. Calls seem to be working now, but for some reason they now get sent to the gateway for transcoding. I enabled outbound fast-start on the gateway and this seems to have something to do with it.

4/7/2009 13:03
Had to put this aside for a while as we had other projects. I was able to find a configuration that worked. The propblem had to do with checking/unchecking the "Direct IP-IP Audio Connections" check box in the signaling group on the Avaya side. With this box checked, the call is set up and the endpointrs do indeed become the Cisco phone and one of the med-pro cards in the PBX that are in the region specified in the appropriate signaling group.

I'll get configs scraped out of each system shortly.

Still to do:
1. No voicemail light: I may have to figure out QSIG over h.323 - ugh.
2. double check on the truning interaction with the various members in the CCM cluster. I need to do some basic engineernig with egions, subscribers, locations etc to complete this design.