This feature enables routers to provide call-handling support for Cisco Unified IP phones if they lose connection to remote primary, secondary, or tertiary Cisco Unified Communications Manager installations or if the WAN connection is down. When Cisco Unified SRST functionality is provided by Cisco Unified CME, provisioning of phones is automatic and most Cisco Unified CME features are available to the phones during periods of fallback, including hunt-groups, call park and access to Cisco Unity voice messaging services using SCCP protocol. The benefit is that Cisco Unified Communications Manager users will gain access to more features during fallback without any additional licensing costs.

This feature offers a limited telephony feature set during fallback mode. Customers who require the following features should continue to use Cisco Unified SRST, because these features are not supported with SRST fallback support using Cisco Unified CME.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager supports Cisco Unified IP phones at remote sites attached to Cisco Integrated Services Routers across the WAN. This new feature combines the many features available in Cisco Unified CME with the ability to automatically detect IP phone configurations that is available in Cisco Unified SRST to provide seamless call handling when communication with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager is interrupted.

When the system automatically detects a failure, Cisco Unified SRST uses Simple Network Auto Provisioning (SNAP) technology to auto-configure a branch office router to provide call processing for the Cisco Unified IP phones that are registered with the router. When the WAN link or connection to the primary Cisco Unified Communications Manager is restored, call handling returns to the primary Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

A limited number of phone features are automatically detected at the time that call processing falls back to Cisco Unified CME in SRST Fallback Mode, and an advantage of SRST fallback support using Cisco Unified CME is that you can choose to prebuild a Cisco Unified CME configuration that contains a number of extensions (ephone-dns) with additional features that you want them to have for some or all of your extensions. The configurations will contain ephone-dn configurations but will not identify which phones (which MAC addresses) will be associated with which ephone-dns (extension numbers).

By copying and pasting a prebuilt configuration onto Cisco Unified CME routers at several locations, you can use the same overall configuration for sites that are identically laid out. For example, if you have a number of retail stores, each with five to ten checkout registers, you can use the same overall configuration in each store. You might use a range of extensions from 1101 to 1110. Stores with fewer than ten registers will simply not use some of the ephone-dn entries you provide in the configuration. Stores with more extensions than you have prebuilt will use the auto-provisioning feature to populate their extra phones. The only configuration variations from store to store will be the specific MAC addresses of the individual phones, which are added to the configurations at the time of fallback.

When a phone registers for SRST service with a Cisco Unified CME router and the router discovers that the phone was configured with a specific extension number, the router searches for an existing prebuilt ephone-dn with that extension number and then assigns that ephone-dn number to the phone. If there is no prebuilt ephone-dn with that extension number, the Cisco Unified CME system automatically creates one. In this way, extensions without prebuilt configurations are automatically populated with extension numbers and features as the numbers and features are “learned” by the Cisco Unified CME router in SRST mode when the phone registers to the router after a WAN link fails.

The SRST fallback support using Cisco Unified CME feature is able to interrogate phones to learn their MAC addresses and the extension-to-ephone relationships associated with each phone. This information is used to dynamically create and execute the Cisco Unified CME button command for each phone and automatically provision each phone with the extensions and features you want it to have.

The following sequence describes how Cisco Unified CME provides SRST services for Cisco Unified Communications Manager phones when they lose connectivity with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager and fall back to the Cisco Unified CME router in SRST mode:

Before Fallback

During Fallback

1. Phones that are enabled for fallback register to the default Cisco Unified CME router that has SRST mode enabled. Each display-enabled IP phone displays the message that has been defined using the system message command under telephony-service configuration mode. By default, this message is “Cisco Unified CME.”

2. While the fallback phones are registering, the router in SRST mode initiates an interrogation of the phones in order to learn their phone and extension configurations. The following information is acquired or “learned” by the router:

   • MAC address

   • Number of lines or buttons

   • Ephone-dn-to-button relationship

   • Speed-dial numbers

3. The option defined with the srst mode auto-provision command determines whether Cisco Unified CME adds the learned phone and extension information to its running configuration. If the information is added, it appears in the output when you use the show running-config command and is saved to NVRAM when you use the write command.

   • Use the srst mode auto-provision none command to enable the Cisco Unified CME router to provide SRST fallback services for Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

   • If you use the srst mode auto-provision dn or srst mode auto-provision all commands, the Cisco Unified CME router includes the phone configuration it learns from Cisco Unified Communications Manager in its running configuration. If you then save the configuration, the fallback phones are treated as locally configured phones on the Cisco Unified CME-SRST router which could adversely impact the fallback behavior of those phones.

4. While in fallback mode, Cisco Unified IP phones periodically attempt to reestablish a connection with Cisco Unified Communications Manager every 120 seconds (default). To manually reestablish a connection to Cisco Unified Communications Manager you can reboot the Cisco Unified IP phone.

5. When a connection is reestablished with Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified IP phones automatically cancel their registration with the Cisco Unified CME router in SRST mode. However, if a WAN link is unstable, Cisco Unified IP phones can bounce between Cisco Unified Communications Manager and the Cisco Unified CME router in SRST mode.

An IP phone connected to the Cisco Unified CME-SRST router over a WAN reconnects itself to Cisco Unified Communications Manager as soon as it can establish a connection to Cisco Unified Communications Manager over the WAN link. However, if the WAN link is unstable, the IP phone switches back and forth between Cisco Unified CME-SRST and Cisco Unified Communications Manager, causing temporary loss of phone service (no dial tone). These reconnect attempts, known as WAN link flapping issues, continue until the IP phone successfully reconnects itself back to Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

WAN link disruptions can be classified into two types: infrequent random outages that occur on an otherwise stable WAN, and sporadic, frequent disruptions that last a few minutes.

To resolve WAN-link flapping issues between Cisco Unified Communications Manager and SRST, Cisco Unified Communications Manager provides an enterprise parameter and a setting in the Device Pool Configuration window called Connection Monitor Duration. (Depending on system requirements, the administrator decides which parameter to use.) The value of the parameter is delivered to the IP phone in the XML configuration file.

• Use the enterprise parameter to change the connection duration monitor value for all IP phones in the Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster. The default for the enterprise parameter is 120 seconds.

• Use the Device Pool Configuration window to change the connection duration monitor value for all IP phones in a specific device pool.

A Cisco Unified IP phone will not reestablish a connection with the primary Cisco Unified Communications Manager at the central office if it is engaged in an active call.

After the First Fallback

Additional features can be set up, such as ephone hunt groups, which can contain learned extensions and prebuilt extensions. The complete core set of Cisco Unified CME phone features is available to the IP phones and extensions, whether they are learned or configured.

Figure 51-1 shows a branch office with several Cisco Unified IP phones connected to a Cisco Unified CME router in SRST fallback mode. The router provides connections to both a WAN link and the PSTN. The Cisco Unified IP phones connect to their primary Cisco Unified Communications Manager at the central office via this WAN link. Cisco Unified CME provides SRST services for the phones when connectivity over the WAN link is interrupted.

Prebuilding Cisco Unified CME ephone-dns allows you to create a set of directory numbers with extension numbers and some features, which will provide service during fallback that is similar to the service that is provided during normal operation. You can prebuild all of your normal extensions, a limited set of your extensions, or none of your extensions. Directory numbers that are not prebuilt will be populated with extension numbers and features as they are “learned” by the Cisco Unified CME router in SRST mode at the time of fallback.

An ephone-dn is the IP equivalent of a normal phone line in most cases. It represents a potential call connection and is associated with a virtual voice port and virtual dial peer. An ephone-dn has one or more extension or telephone numbers associated with it, which allow call connections to be made. An ephone-dn can be single-line, which allows one call connection to be made at a time, or dual-line, which allows two simultaneous call connections. Dual-line ephone-dns are useful for features such as call transfer or call waiting, in which one call is put on hold to connect to another. Single-line ephone-dns are required for certain features such as intercom, paging, and message-waiting indication (MWI). For more information, see Cisco Unified CME Overview.

If an ephone-dn is manually configured in Cisco Unified CME, incoming calls will always route to the manually configured ephone-dn in Cisco Unified CME rather than to Cisco Unified Communications Manager using the voip dial peer. To avoid incorrect routing, configure a higher preference for the voip dial peer than the preference for the prebuilt directory number. For configuration example, see Example for Prebuilding DNs.

Cisco Unified CME 4.3 and later versions support octo-line directory numbers in SRST fallback mode. You can specify whether Cisco Unified CME in SRST fallback mode creates octo-line or dual-line directory numbers based on the phone type. For the Cisco Unified IP Phone 7902 or 7920, or an analog phone connected to the Cisco VG224 or Cisco ATA, the system creates a dual-line directory number; it creates an octo-line directory number for all other phone types. This applies only to the ephone-dns that are “learned” automatically from ephone configuration information, and not to ephone-dns that are manually configured in Cisco Unified CME.

You can optionally create a set of ephone-dns that are preconfigured with extension numbers and some features to provide service during fallback that is similar to the service that is provided during normal operation. Extensions that are not prebuilt are populated with extension numbers and features as they are “learned” by the Cisco Unified CME router in SRST mode at the time of fallback.

Note

To avoid incorrect routing when you prebuild ephone-dns for Cisco Unified Communications Manager phones in Cisco Unified CME, use the preference command in ephone-dn and voip-dial-peer configuration mode to create a higher preference (0 being the highest) for the voip dial peer than the preference for the prebuilt directory number. For configuration example, see Example for Prebuilding DNs.