Hello, in this article, you can find out how to activate the H.323 Gateway function on Cisco Meeting Server and receive H.323 calls, and the necessary configuration parameters to enable H.323 on CMS.
As you may know, Cisco Meeting Server is a server that works with SIP protocol. Therefore, there is a gateway module that converts H.323 messages into SIP to handle the H.323 calls coming to CMS. If you are using H.323 in your existing video conferencing infrastructure or have legacy devices that only support H.323, you can turn on the H.323 gateway feature on the CMS to enable integration with the CMS.
Cisco Meeting Server H.323 Configuration Steps
We need to use the command line to activate the H.323 Gateway module on the CMS. After connecting to the CMS via SSH, you can activate the module by entering the following commands.
First we need to define the interface on the gateway module to listen for H.323 & SIP calls:
h323_gateway h323 interfaces a h323_gateway sip interfaces a
To ensure that the CMS does not interfere with the existing SIP signaling, we need to define a different SIP port to be used for messages converted from H.323 to SIP. It should not be 5060 or 5061.
h323_gateway sip port 6061
For H.323-SIP calls, we need to define the SIP proxy address (actually the server itself):
h323_gateway sip proxy 127.0.0.1
We then need to define the key-certificate chain to be used by the H.323 gateway for secure connections:
h323_gateway certs cms1.key cms1.cer CA.cer
For calls that need to be converted to SIP, we need to define the SIP domain name to match the definitions of “Incoming calls” rules inside:
h323_gateway sip_domain test.local
and finally activate the gateway module:
h323_gateway enable
If you want to get information about the status of the H.323 Gateway module, you can use the following command:
h323_gateway
After these steps, you can make H.323 calls to the CMS. Since the H.323 calls made are converted to SIP in the CMS, you will see the calls in the GUI as SIP calls.
You can also follow these steps through the following video: