How to Activate Enhanced Survivability

Overview

In an unlikely event of a customer’s network outage, or a cloud outage, preventing users at that site from connecting to Webex Calling Dedicated Instance, the Enhanced Survivability Node actively takes over the call routing responsibility. Throughout the outage, the Enhanced Survivability Node will process all Intra-site, PSTN and Emergency calls for the users in that site.

The Enhanced Survivability Node is used during any of the following events:

Customer Network outage – for e.g. WAN or ISP outage.
Dedicated Instance Calling service is unavilable.

Solution Overview

A Unified CM node deployed in Customer’s data center connects to the Dedicated Instance Unified CM Cluster as an Enhanced Survivability Node.

During a survivability event, all the devices and third-party integrations that support Enhanced Survivability Node will failover.

The following are the key specifications for an Enhanced Survivability Node:

A maximum of only 8 Enhanced Survivability Nodes can be deployed in a single Unified CM cluster.
The round-trip time (RTT) between the Unified CM cluster in Dedicated Instance and the enhanced survivability node should be equal or less than 200 milliseconds.
A maximum of 7500 devices can be registered on the Enhanced Survivability Node during an event of Survivability.
The feature is supported only on Edge or Partner Connect, cloud connectivity options.

The following are the key specifications for an Enhanced Survivability Node:The following table lists the feature comparison between SRST and Enhanced Survivability Node:

Call Scenarios	SRST	Enhanced Survivability Node
Basic and Supplementary Calls (Inbound, Outbound, Hold/Resume)	Yes	Yes
PSTN Calls	Yes	Yes
Nomadic E911 Support	Yes	Yes
EPIC CRM Integration	No	Yes
SIP integrations	Yes	Yes
CTI Integration	No	Yes
Paging Support (with CTI)	No	Yes

How to order

Navigate to the CCW Ordering site, and then click Login to sign on to the site: https://apps.cisco.com/Commerce/guest.

Click Create Estimate and add A-FLEX-3 SKU.

Click Select Options and add the respective SKUs for Webex Calling.

Select “Webex Calling Dedicated Instance” and “Enhanced Survivability for Webex Calling Dedicated Instance” and provide the region quantity. The region quantity can equal or less than the Webex Calling Dedicated Instance region quantity. Below are SKU names for the feature:

A-FLEX-DI-ESV (applies to both Suite an EA)

A-FLEX-DI-NU-ESV (applies to NU)

A-FLEX-DI-ESV-E (applies to EDU in FLEX 3)

A-FLEX-DI-NU-ESV-E (applies to EDU in FLEX 3)

Upon successfully placing the order for Enhanced Survivability for Webex Calling Dedicated Instance, an email will be sent to the “E-delivery email address” provided in CCW, with the details for downloading the Unified CM bootable ISO. This would be required for you to install the Enhanced Survivability Node at your premise. We provide the bootable ISO only for the main Unified CM releases and in a scenario where your target version is different from the main release version, you would need to first install the main release using the bootable ISO provided and post that upgrade to the same version as the Dedicated Instance Unified CM publisher's version (upgrade ISOs are available to all to download).

Enable Enhanced Survivability

Refer Prerequisite to follow firewall, DNS, and proxy server settings configuration before continuing with the enhanced survivability node installation and activation.

Once the Enhanced Survivability feature has been added to the subscription, in Control Hub you need to enable the feature for a particular region, where the Enhanced Survivability Node will be deployed.

Sign-in to Control Hub  https://admin.webex.com/login, navigate to Calling > Dedicated Instance > Enhanced Survivability..

The feature can be enabled only in the region(s) where the Dedicated Instance service has been activated.

Click Enable for the region to initiate the Enhanced Survivability activation.

Once a particular region is enabled, the action is irreversible.

When successfully enabled, the Enhanced Survivability tile is visible in the Unified CM publisher's right panel in the respective region.

If a Dedicated Instance region has multiple Unified CM clusters, the Enhanced Survivability tile is available in all the cluster’s publisher nodes.

Add Enhanced Survivability Node

Navigate to Calling > Dedicated Instance > Manage tab and choose a region. Under the region, select the Unified CM publisher for which the Enhanced Survivability Node must be added.

In the Enhanced Survivability tile, click Add Survivability Node.

Provide the IP address for the list of nodes and click Confirm. We provide the Enhanced Survivability Node’s Hostname. While installing the Enhanced survivability node, you should use the same Hostname and IP address.

Maximum of only 8 Enhanced Survivability Nodes can be added and activated per Unified CM cluster.

The IP address provided in the above form cannot be modified, once added.

Click Confirm and the summary page appears.

The summary page will provide all the details that requires for you to install the Enhanced Survivability Node. Click Export to download the detailed document. The downloadable export file has all the required details to install the Enhanced Survivability Node in your on-premises, such as:

Unified CM version and OVA specifications
IP address and hostname for the survivability nodes
Network and Security settings on the customer’s networking and firewall side.
Proxy server settings for the survivability node to reach the Cisco Cloud.

Install Enhanced Survivability Node

The Enhanced Survivability Node installation is the responsibility of the customer or partner. You need to install the Unified CM publisher node (standalone) in the data center (preferably the branch site location). See the following details during installation:

The Enhanced Survivability Node should be the same version as the Dedicated Instance Unified CM version. The version details are provided in the downloadable export file, refer Add survivability node to a Unified CM cluster.

As mentioned in How to order Enhanced Survivability, after placing the order for Enhanced Survivability in CCW, an email with the link for downloading the Unified CM bootable ISO will be sent to the e-delivery email address.

We provide the link to only the main release bootable ISO of Unified CM and if you want to install a different version, first you must install the main release version and then upgrade to the same version as the Dedicated Instance cluster.

Enhanced Survivability Node is supported in Unified CM version V14 SU3 and above.

It is necessary for the enhanced survivability node to be reachable from Dedicated Instance cloud through the existing peering.

Activate Enhanced Survivability Node

In Control Hub, navigate to Calling > Dedicated Instance > Manage.

Select the desired Unified CM Publisher node> Enhanced Survivability and Click Activate for the Enhanced Survivability Node that needs to be added to the cluster as survivable node.

In the activation form, the admin would need to confirm that the Enhanced Survivability Node has been installed in the customer’s datacenter with the mentioned hostname and IP address.

Only one enhanced survivability node can be activated at a time within a Unified CM cluster.

The following details of the Enhanced Survivability Node installed needs to be provided to Cisco and this information is used for the conversion of Unified CM publisher node to Enhanced Survivability Node in the customer premise. OS admin username and password is of the RSN installed by the customer in their premise.

The proxy settings are optional and can be done by customer or Cisco will configure the same during activation. In case the proxy setting is required to be configured by Cisco, the “Proxy server URL” and authentication credentials needs to be provided in the form.

Click Activate and then Confirmto start the Activation of Enhanced Survivability Node.

It’s highly recommended to perform the activation of the Enhanced Survivability Node during a maintenance period, as during the activation process the phones gets restarted.

The status of the activation can be viewed under, Calling > Dedicated Instance > Manage > Select Unified CM Publisher node and in the right hand panel the Enhanced Survivability tile will show the status. Following is the status for survivability node:

Activation in progress– activation of Enhanced Survivability Node is in progress. You can click on “View Details” to view which activation progress more in detail and the Estimated completion date and time.
Online – When the survivability node is successfully converted, the status is shown as “Online”.
Offline – When the Cisco cloud cannot reach the survivability node, the status is shown as “Offline”. The customer would need to check on their side the survivability node installation and network and security settings.
Pre-check error – Before the actual conversion of the node, Cisco executes a pre-check on the Enhanced Survivability Node to be activated. You can view the error more in detail by clicking on view details.
(Pause) Action Required – The activation flow pauses when the ESN node is added to the Dedicated Instance cluster and before certificate regeneration. You must approve to continue with the activation flow. It’s advised to allow this activity during non-business hours since the regeneration and upload of certificates require restarting the services and phones.
(Error) Action Required – This error displays when you hold the responsibility of managing the certifications for the Unified CM cluster in the Dedicated Instance to which the Enhanced Survivability Node is added too. You must upload the "CallManager" and "Tomcat" certificates to the publisher node and sign them using a Public Certificate Authority (CA), ensuring that the Enhanced Survivability Node is included.

For more information, See Unified CM Certificate Alert.

The activation will not succeed if the above steps are not completed since the publisher and the Enhanced Survivability Node will not successfully sync.

Checkbox — I confirm that the above steps are completed, and the activation can proceed.

If you see Action Required status, click on view details to get the detailed steps to proceed further.

Troubleshooting

OS administrator username and password error

The OS administrator username and password or the security password provided in the activation form is not correct and Cisco is not able to connect to the Enhanced Survivability Node using the same. The issue can be fixed by, clicking on Update Credentials and provide the correct credentials to re-start the activation process.

Enhanced Survivability Node version and node type error

Make sure the Enhanced Survivability Node installed in the customer premise is a stand-alone publisher node and version is the same as of the Unified CM publisher in Dedicated Instance. Once the corrections are done, click on Continue to re-start the activation process.

Firewall port error

Make sure all the firewall ports and IP address configurations are done as mentioned in the section “Network and Security settings on Customer premise”. Once the corrections are done, click on Continue to re-start the activation process.

Unified CM Certificate Alert

You will receive the alert if you manage the Cisco Unified CM certificates. You have to sign the CallManager Certificate and Tomcat Certificate and upload to all the Unified CM nodes in the cluster.

While signing, make sure the Enhanced Survivability node is included.

Once the certificates are signed and uploaded, to continue with Activation, select the checkbox and click on Activate.

Proxy server error

The proxy server settings need to be correct for the node to reach the Cisco Cloud. For more information refer “Proxy Server Settings” and once the proxy is fixed the activation can be re-triggered by clicking on Continue.