Cisco Cisco Customer Voice Portal 8.0(1)

a second “Queue to Skill Group” node. If the value is not “1”, immediately go to the second
“Queue to Skill Group Node.”

Alternate Gatekeeper Support

The Unified CVP H.323 Service can use an alternate gatekeeper in the event that the primary
configured gatekeeper fails. Most customers want redundant gatekeepers, so Unified CVP has
always supported paired gatekeepers in a Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) configuration.
HSRP provides a single (virtual) IP address behind which two gatekeepers can operate. However,
HSRP is a relatively old protocol which has a number of shortcomings, most notably that the
two gatekeepers in a pair must be co-located at the same site. This confounds customers' attempts
to provide geographic redundancy, and requires such customers to purchase twice as many
gatekeepers as they would otherwise need.

The term alternate gatekeeper has multiple meanings:

•

The ability of an H.323 endpoint, such as a gateway, to statically configure two gatekeepers
to provide a backup in the event the primary fails.

•

The ability of an H.323 endpoint to register to a GUP cluster.

Best results are achieved when Unified CVP uses the GUP cluster method of alternate gatekeeper
since solution tests have shown that proper load-balancing to Unified CVP devices is difficult
to achieve with straight alternate gatekeeper methods. Although Unified CVP itself cannot
process GUP messages, it can participate in the GUP cluster. It simply ignores GUP messages
and functions as a straight alternate gatekeeper client as described below.

The following is a simple example of Unified CVP being used in a gatekeeper cluster.

Configuration and Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal Release 8.0(1)