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The HP Community is where owners of HP products, like you, volunteer to help each other find solutions.
HP Recommended

Hello all,

I'm fairly new to the Polycom world and am looking for an issue we investigated for some time now without any further succes.

Our customer has a companywide use of Polycom VVX500 phones over different sites. These make use of a  Enterprise Lync infrastructure (2 front end servers and an edge server).

 

Some time ago they had an issue where one the frontends was unavailable which triggered a failover in the result. Very normal behaviour, alas we noticed though that the VVX phones also had an impact and rebooted or lost connectivity in result of the failover. This is based on feedback of the customer.

 

The cause for this seemed to be that the phones only had one of the servers configured as a connected server instead of the Lync pool. We were asked how to configure this so the phones connect to their lyncpool instead of one of the servers in case one of the servers fails over. This can be seen in the web configuration menu of the VVX500 - Diagnostics\Lync Status\Misscelaneous info\Connected Lync Server (see attached screenshot).  Any thoughts on this, is this something we can add to the cfg file, pushed out via provisioning or can this be configured in some other way?

Thanks in advance!

 

 

5 REPLIES 5
HP Recommended

Hello Jplaetevoet,

welcome to the Polycom Community.

It is always useful to include the currently used UC Software version as issues experienced may already be addressed in a newer release.

This also allows yourself and others to check against current software release notes.

The above is also stated in the "Read First"

Therefore the Polycom VoIP FAQ contains this post here:

Question: How can I find out my SIP UC Software Version or the BootROM Version of my Phone?
Resolution: Please check here

 

In reply to your question you would "normally" not specify a server as such as you either:

 

  • Use SSI / Single Sign In aka using a Username / Domain / Password combination
    or
  • Use Extension and PIN sign in details

The rest is all pre-defined LYNC / Skype for Business Standards aka DNS Names / Lookups for the relevant server pool in this case.

 

A simple backup of the configuration via the Web Interface should show you if they falsely manually configured any settings.

 

We would need much more details of the setup and you may need to involve a Microsoft design engineer or one of our professional services.


Please ensure to provide some feedback if this reply has helped you so other users can profit from your experience.

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

Polycom Global Services

------------------------------------------------
Notice: I am an HP Poly employee but all replies within the community are done as a volunteer outside of my day role. This community forum is not an official HP Poly support resource, thus responses from HP Poly employees, partners, and customers alike are best-effort in attempts to share learned knowledge.
If you need immediate and/or official assistance for former Poly\Plantronics\Polycom please open a service ticket through your support channels
For HP products please check HP Support.

Please also ensure you always check the General VoIP , Video Endpoint , UC Platform (Microsoft) , PSTN
HP Recommended

Hi Steffen,

 

First of all thanks for you reply and apologies for my brief first post, I wasn't aware of the sticky post informing about the essential info (firmware version etc.)

 

Our current used version for the VVX500 devices:

UC Software Version 5.4.4.3041

 

All end-users use the pin extension to sign in. I've checked our DNS and see no direct inconsistencies explaining the connected lync server being one of the frondends instead of the configured lyncpool. Our DNS exist of the known TLS zones and required discoverinternal zone (see attached screenshot).

 

In the lyncpool zone both frontends are available as A records and point to their IP as a way of loadbalancing I guess.

Should we add an Alias record instead with the Lyncpool hostname pointing to these Ip's? Would this make a change?

 

I also took a backup from one of the phones but can't seem to find the paramater that configures the connected server.

Do you have any idea what switch gives this info to the devices? If needed I can provide you a copy of the backup file.

Thanks in advance!

 

Regards,

 

Jplaetevoet

 

HP Recommended

Hello Jplaetevoet,

thanks for providing the minimum information as requested in the Read Me First.

 

In regards of your original problem this sounds pretty much standard and I am not sure why the failover would affect the phones. We follow simple LYNC / Skype for Business standards and nothing else.

 

To proceed we would need to get some logs of the phones.

 

In order to do this you would need to work with your Polycom reseller so we could advise the relevant logging levels.

 

Usually SIP and DNS at least in Debug.


In order to raise a support ticket you need to work with your Polycom reseller as they need to do this for you. In case this is some sort of an Internet discounter please post your phone's MAC address so I can look up who would be able to support you.

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

Polycom Global Services

------------------------------------------------
Notice: I am an HP Poly employee but all replies within the community are done as a volunteer outside of my day role. This community forum is not an official HP Poly support resource, thus responses from HP Poly employees, partners, and customers alike are best-effort in attempts to share learned knowledge.
If you need immediate and/or official assistance for former Poly\Plantronics\Polycom please open a service ticket through your support channels
For HP products please check HP Support.

Please also ensure you always check the General VoIP , Video Endpoint , UC Platform (Microsoft) , PSTN
HP Recommended

Hi Steffen,

 

Thanks for your fast reply once again.

After some research today i'm glad to say I was able to find a partial solution to the problem!

Just to summarize and clarify the issue reported by our customer once again; the initial issue existed due to the text given in the miscellaneus info pane below Diagnostics>Lync Status (see attached images for the different text that is diplayed with two of our users)

 

Screenshot 1 gives away that the connected home server is the Lyncpool

Screenshot 2 gives away that the connected home server is one of the frontend servers

 

Our customer had the idea that if the phones were not connected to the Lyncpool but on of the frontend servers instead, that the phones were not able to failover correctly to the other available frondend server. This since they were only connected to one of the servers instead of the pool. Current setup as posted before 2 Enterprise Frontend servers with a backend SQL.

 

As you initially answered me the "Connected Lync Server" field is indeed determined by MS Lync, as the Lync registrar (Preferred Lync Home Server) is randomly divided between the different Fronted servers with the creation of the Lync account. I've managed to find this with the cmdlets given in below article.

 

Source:

https://greiginsydney.com/which-front-end-server-is-my-lync-account-registered-to/

(see also the given source in the comments of above article: http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2011/05/25/dns-load-balancing-in-lync-server-2010.aspx)

 

I've now noticed that the IP given in the field is actually the correct info and not the text before it.

Another question that remains with the customer is; "when the failover occurs the end-users that were on the home server that initiated the failover don't automatically failover to the other server and have to manually log in again to have full functionality of the VVX again"

I'm not sure but is this behaviour that occurs "by design"? Seems to me that it is.
If a failover occurs in a pool of 2 frontend servers there is no secondary backup server to determine quorum, so a manual log in seems to be mandatory I guess. As this probably occurs with the Lync client as well.

 

Let me know your thoughts on this Steffen.

Thanks in advance!

 

Regards,

 

JPlaetevoet

 

 

 

HP Recommended

Hello Jplaetevoet,


I am unable to make any comments in regards the design of LYNC or Skype environment but our phones do support failover scenarios.

 

If your customer faces an issue you must open a ticket. If you require design help please work with a Microsoft architect or work with Polycom Global Services.


Please ensure to provide some feedback if this reply has helped you so other users can profit from your experience.

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

Polycom Global Services

------------------------------------------------
Notice: I am an HP Poly employee but all replies within the community are done as a volunteer outside of my day role. This community forum is not an official HP Poly support resource, thus responses from HP Poly employees, partners, and customers alike are best-effort in attempts to share learned knowledge.
If you need immediate and/or official assistance for former Poly\Plantronics\Polycom please open a service ticket through your support channels
For HP products please check HP Support.

Please also ensure you always check the General VoIP , Video Endpoint , UC Platform (Microsoft) , PSTN
† The opinions expressed above are the personal opinions of the authors, not of HP. By using this site, you accept the <a href="https://www8.hp.com/us/en/terms-of-use.html" class="udrlinesmall">Terms of Use</a> and <a href="/t5/custom/page/page-id/hp.rulespage" class="udrlinesmall"> Rules of Participation</a>.