RingCentral hosted Voice with MX84

[jon1]

Hello All,

We are doing a Network assessment with RingCentral. After a 5 day assessment they have noticed high jitter with packets coming into my network. They say it is caused by an IDS/IPS system. I do have IPS turned on with a Balanced ruleset. RingCentral says to exclude their subnets from being inspected by the IPS. Meraki support says that is not possible only URL's can be whitelisted. Does anyone use RingCentral as their hosted voice solution? Have you found a work around to still enable IPS?

Thanks, Jon1

[BrandonS]

I sell and install both and have never had much of a problem.  We use RingCentral and a MX at our own office and I use it at my home office too.  Have you used their network test tools and have you tried disabling AMP and IDS to see if it even makes a difference?

[BrandonS]

These are the tools I would run with and without AMP and IDS enabled:

https://www.ringcentral.com/support/qos.html

https://www.ringcentral.com/support/capacity.html

And this is their Meraki configuration guide:

https://netstorage.ringcentral.com/guides/meraki_mx64.pdf

[BrandonS]

And this is the current KB article the that includes current supernets, etc.

https://success.ringcentral.com/articles/en_US/RC_Knowledge_Article/9233

[jon1]

With IPS enabledWithout IPS

Disabled IPS on the MX (AMP is still on). These shots are from RingCentral's Network Assessment Tool.

So it looks like IPS was impacting the jitter of the voice traffic. With no way of segmenting IPS to never "scan" packets sent to the supernets of RingCentral, I guess IPS stays off?

@BrandonSDo you have IPS turned on with your MX devices? If so, do you have any voice quality issues?

Thanks for your links to the RC network tests!

[BrandonS]

I do have IPS enabled and with prevention/security.  I was going to suggest a group policy for the RC phones, but it looks like you can't disable IPS/IDS in the group policies.

How many clients and what bandwidth do you have?  I wonder if you are pushing the limits of your MX?

What ratio of desk and soft phones do you have?  If all or most desk phones you may be able to use a voice VLAN and find a clever way to bypass the MX.

I am going to run those test from my home with IPS/IDS on and off to see if I see a difference here.

[jon1]

We are not using RingCentral yet, just 2 test numbers, they are doing a Network Assessment before we implement to all users.

Our internet service is 75/15

The up speed is low but the jitter did improve with the IPS turned off.

Summary report for the last day.

Looks like we could be hitting our max upload bandwidth?

[BrandonS]

I have similar internet at my home office with cable. Are the screenshots of jitter in table form from the RC tests?  I don't see them in that format.  I did run sos an capacity tests and they have good results even with IPS at the secure setting so it makes me think you are having an issue with upload.  How many phones do you intend to deploy and how many simultaneous calls do you estimate? I would generally think with that upload speed maybe 10-15 simultaneous calls.

Besides just disabling IPS you might also look at traffic shaping and see if you have the default QOS rule enabled.  You could also consider setting per client limits and trying to throttle some clients or applications that are contributing to the uploads during the day.

[jon1]

The screenshots are from RC's Network Readiness Assessment (NRA) test that we purchased when we signed on with RC. The 2 tests you posted links to are different. At this location we will have approx. 50 phones, mostly soft phones. Planning on 15 max consecutive call volume.

I see you are also in the RC Community, I found this doc there and I followed the setup requirements. FYI, you might have to sign in to RC's Community to see this document. https://netstorage.ringcentral.com/guides/meraki_mx64.pdf 

I'm going round and round with RC to figure this out. FYI, our test calls have been very good. 

I did set client bandwidth limits and I have traffic shaping for the RC networks.

I'll post when we get this figured out.

[jon1]

I see now you already posted that document! Sorry.

[BrandonS]

---

@jon1 wrote:

I see now you already posted that document! Sorry.

---

No worries.  Good luck and let us know what you work out.