[cisco-voip] IP IVR licensing

[Paul]

Here's a little excerpt I got from a little Cisco birdy that whispered in my ear. . . 

High Availability as a warm-standby feature is not supported by Cisco
when IP-IVR is deployed in ICM/UCC Enterprise designs. It is supported
when the IP-IVR is ONLY connected to Communications Manager subscribers.

The High availability redundancy feature was built primarily for use by
UCC Express which shares the same code base and processing engine as
IP-IVR.



http://tinyurl.com/l9cyep

reference
"Understanding Failure Recovery"

"Unified IP IVR Release 3.5 provided for cold standby and Release 4.0
provides hot standby redundancy, but this configuration is not
recommended for use with Unified CCE. These designs make use of a
redundant server that is not used unless there is a failure of the
primary Unified IP IVR server. However, during this failover processing,
all calls that are in queue or treatment are dropped on the Unified IP
IVR as part of the failover. A more resilient design would be to deploy
a second (or more) Unified IP IVR server(s) and have them all active,
allowing the Unified CCE to load-balance calls across them
automatically. As shown in Figure 3-21, if one of the Unified IP IVR
servers should fail, only the calls on that server would fail, but the
other active servers would remain active and be able to accept new calls
in the system." 

The primary reason is that the active failover status of each IVR is not
communicated by the primary IP-IVR to the ICM in current sw versions.
The ICM does not see or understand the two IP-IVRs as a connected pair,
just as two IVRs. The secondary/backup IP-IVR is seen as an off-line
peripheral by the ICM when it is in standby mode, and it fills up the
process logs and event viewer with an endless notification that the
secondary IP-IVR is down. 

There are a list of reasons it does not work with ICM the same way it
works when IP-IVR is only connected to CUCM subscribers.

The normal way IP-IVR is deployed, and the way the SRND is actually
referring to, is to have two independent, active hardware instances of
IP-IVR and use the IF statement formulas either in their own script
nodes, or within what is called Translation routing in ICM scripting.

The ICM uses that logic to check the health of each IP-IVR, check system
and port availability (there are specific formulas that even support
checking the IP-IVR subsystems.)The load balancing ensures an even
distribution of calls across the platforms - they are active-active -
and you know very quickly when one of the machines is in trouble. You
can also go beyond two machines in the logic.

So a summary of my personal understanding is that in Unified IP IVR with UCCE there is no HA like a CCM cluster but rather as a UCCE engineer, we're responsible for handling "failover" within the ICM routing scripts and make sure they have the same IP IVR scripts loaded.

I'd be delighted if you would provide more details. 

Thanks and Cheers!

Paul




________________________________
From: Matthew Saskin <msaskin at gmail.com>
To: Paul <asobihoudai at yahoo.com>
Cc: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 7:48:28 PM
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] IP IVR licensing

IP/IVR w/ UCCE doesn't have a concept of "failover", at least as far as the IVR is concerned, but this much you already found out :)

When using IP/IVR you load balance between any number of VRU's (be they Cisco IP/IVR or 3rd party VRU's) by utilizing multiple routes within a "translation route to VRU" script node.  You can set up various expressions within the translation route script node to round-robin through all of the VRU's, load balance based on idle trunks, check whether trunks are in service first and load balance, balance based on variables, etc - lots of possibilities.

>From the IP/IVR standpoint, each IVR operates standalone and independent of the rest of the environment.  This means if have 2 (or more) IVR's you need to manually load the scripts/prompts to each IVR and set the ICM configuration/integration on each one.

Let me know if you need more details and I can elaborate.

-matt


On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Paul <asobihoudai at yahoo.com> wrote:


As much as I am loathe to reply to my own messages, I have discovered the answer to my questions through the "Getting Started with IP IVR 6.0.1." Under UCCE usage, IP IVR failover is NOT supported in a CCM-like SQL cluster failover it is still possible to have ICM control the failover of calls sent to two distinctly separate IP IVR servers. Now my question is, how difficult is it to configure IP IVR failover on ICM and am I required to use MSDE for its databases or can I use MS SQL 2000 on each distinct IP IVR?

Paul




----- Original Message ----
From: Paul <asobihoudai at yahoo.com>
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 2:41:45 PM
Subject: [cisco-voip] IP IVR licensing


While I understand that CRS server is UCCX and IP IVR, what sort of licensing does IP IVR follow under? I see Standard, Premium, and Enhanced for UCCX. This is confusing since I'm trying to get to the bottom of my issue which is to see if IP IVR 6.0.1 with the HA option is supported when being used with IPCC Enterprise 7(UCCE).



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-- 
Matthew Saskin
msaskin at gmail.com
203-253-9571