Remote Office Location connect phone via VPN

[dkrajc]

Everyone,

My company is opening up a remote office and I am looking to see if I can put phones in the office that will allow us to call them by dialing an extension. I have been reading around the web that I can get h323 extensions to sign in remotely, it just will not be encrypted, using a 14xx IP phone. I am looking to do this with the 9630 IP phone. I believe this model can make a VPN connection and this is where I am confused. Would I create an IPSec tunnel to my firewall or does the IP office run/need to be configured as the VPN end point.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Daniel Krajc

[havel3]

A 14xx is not a IP Phone, you must have mistyped with 16xx but before H.323 remote phone works your hair will be grey or gone.
To use a 96xx phone with the build in VPN is a good option, these phones connect to a IPSec VPN concentator/firewall at the office, not to the Avaya IP Office. The Avaya IP Office cannot handle IPSec VPN connections.
Best solution would be to use VPN harware devices on both sites and use 16xx phones.

[claud4]

If you have only one or two phones in remote office , use 9600 series phone to directly connect to HO VPN appliance , it will save you one VPN appliance cost .

Always better to have site to site VPN with two VPN appliances on both sides . ( Cheap devices available like Sonicwall TZ 105 , Cisco 887 etc ) . In this case you can use any phone like 1608,9600 series or even E129 ( new cheaper one )

If you have many phones in branch office , better to have two IP Offices on both side . It will save your bandwidth for calling extension to extension in remote office ( otherwise internal extention calls has to be routed through HO ) . In this case you need IP500 VCE NTWK license apart from all other hardware .

[dkrajc]

Everyone,

Thanks for the information.

The remote office is in shared space, so I am not sure if I will be able to put in my own VPN hardware for a point to point tunnel. I think there is only going to be the one phone in the office for right now, more a proof of concept test.

If I am understanding everything correctly I am going to the following:

Firewall/VPN
Set up my VPN hardware at the corp office with an IPSec connection

IP Office/Phone
Create a new extension for the phone, will this be the H323 or a SIP extension?
On the 96xx phone make the connection to the VPN
Configure the phone to use the internal IP address of my IP Office as its calling server

Thanks again.

Daniel Krajc

[oiduran]

The IP Office is not gateway VPN. I have tested vpn client of phones VPN 96xx with Juniper, Mikro tik, Juniper SGS.

Let me to know

[zakabog]

You can setup a firewall at the main office that supports L2TP IPSec and use the phones VPN settings to connect to that VPN. We've used the Cisco ASA 5505 for this in the past and it's worked great. You would configure the phone normally in the IP Office (it doesn't care that it's connecting via a VPN) and you wouldn't need to setup any special equipment in the remote office, in general as long as you have internet the phone should come right up.

[havel3]

It must always be H.323 extensions, Avaya SIP extensions won't work at all on IP Office.
There are many Application notes about the matter for various VPN concentators so do some work and find them and read them. If you follow those docs you'll get it going.

[kenny15]

Dear Guys,
I set up a small office and created VPN Connection on both the sides using firewall and now i configure the phone manually. I put three phones at new office and i tired configuring manually. I succeed with 1st phone but 2nd and 3rd shows bad router when i follows the same config i did for 1st phone.
Anyone, please help me to sort out my issue.

Thanks

Allen

[tarbou]

oiduran - Can you share how you setup the Mikrotik and 96xx phone?

[sbhano]

Hey i don't know about Mikrotik document but here one is for cyberoam just go through it, you will have idea how it works.

https://kb.cyberoam.com/default.asp?id=2971