VOIP recording in a mixed environment: VMware and HP switches

Setup

VMware virtual appliances:
Mitel MX-ONE Call Server
Mitel MiCCE Server
Datatex Amethyst Voice Recorder (2x NIC)

Physical network equipment:
1x Mitel Media Gateway Classic (MGU/2)
1x Mitel Media Gateway Lite (MGU/2)

Solution

Physical network ports on HP Switch
Create a designated mirror port (or two, for VM failover)
mirror 1 port A5

Enable mirroring of each port connected to the physical Media Gateways

interface B2

   monitor all both mirror 1

   monitor all both mirror 2   //if created two above

   name "mguA_mirror"

   exit

interface B3

   monitor all both mirror 1

   monitor all both mirror 2  //if created two above

   name "mguB_mirror"

   exit

VMware vSwitch
Create a new port group just for Recording

• Allow promiscuous mode
• Allow all VLAN [this is NOT the same as 0(None)]
• Add ESXi host's physical NICs connected to the mirror port(s) [A5 in example above]
• Edit appliances to use the new port group

!Note:

• All virtual appliances (MX-ONE and Amethyst recorder) need to be on same physical host!
• When spread across two different hosts, many packets were dropped / not present at the voice recorder.
• Tag the two appliances to cater for instances where they need to fail over to a different host, together.
• Port group settings: VLAN Set to ALL. Otherwise recordings may have one-way speech since the vSwitch will reject tagged traffic, thus inbound part of the conversation will be dropped if origin sits in a VLAN.
• Using two mirror destination ports will allow you to remove and test one at a time for troubleshooting