Cloud Connector Edition (CCE) 1.4.1 Deployment Walkthru Part 2

In the previous blog post, we prepared our host server for CCE1.4.1 installation with the necessary hardware and software pre-requisites and customized the CloudConnector.ini file. In this post, we will start building the VMs which will actually download the necessary software bits from the internet as well and downloading and installing updates, while leveraging the base OS iso image on the host server. After that, we will configure the CCE components to work with our Office365 E5 tenant. As mentioned, we are using an Asterisk IP-PBX to emulate a PSTN Gateway. One additional point that I did not mention in the previous post is that we are using pure Azure AD user accounts for CCE, as opposed to on-premise AD synchronized user accounts required by PSTN Connectivity via an on-premise instance of Skype4B.

Now are ready to prepare the base VHD image that will be used to build the actual CCE VMs. On the host server, we run the script:
Convert-CcIsoToVhdx -IsoFilePath <Windows ISO File Path, including file name> as shown below:

The process can take a long time as the script needs to download the latest updates from the internet to apply it to the base image before running sysprep. In my lab, I left the script running overnight and it was completed when I returned the next morning. There should be no errors if everything went smoothly as shown below:

We can check that the base image was created successfully by looking at the site root directory which is default to ..\\CloudConnector\SiteRoot\Bits\VHD. There should be a file named SFBServer.vhd which is about 20.5GB in size:

Next step is to set the execution policy in powershell by running the 'Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned' cmdlet and then changing the GPO Policy at 'Administrative Templates > System > UserProfiles > Do not forcefully unload the users registry' at user logoff to 'Enabled' as shown below:

Now we are ready to deploy the actual CCE VMs on the host machine. We first need to register the host as a CCE Appliance by running the 'Register-CcAppliance' script. When run for the first time, the script will prompt for a series of passwords. The first is the password for the local administrator and CceService accounts in each VM, followed by the CCE's AD Domain Admin and SafeMode Admin passwords, then the password to import the SSL certificate and finally your O365 online tenant admin password. Once all these are entered correctly, the script will leverage the parameters in the CloudConnector.ini file to create the PSTN site on the online tenant. This process is shown below and if everything went smoothly there will be no errors:

With the appliance registered, we now proceed to actually create and deploy the 4 CCE VMs. This is done by running the 'Install-CcInstance' script. This process will also read the parameters in the CloudConnector.ini file and also check how much memory and disk space is available on the host machine, create the necessary virtual network switches before starting to deploy the 4 CCE VMs in Hyper-V. The process is shown below: 

If everything went smoothly, then the script will complete with no errors and there will be 4 VMs created connected to the correct virtual network switches. It will also start the 4 CCE VMs in Hyper-V as shown below:

On the Hyper-V Management Console, we can see the 4 VMs running and in my host machine which has 32GB of memory, the 4 VMs were deployed with the following memory configurations as shown below:

Once the mediation server component is started, we should be able to create a SIP trunk from the Asterisk PBX to connect to the mediation server. Note that the listening port in the mediation server is TCP 5068 and I could not find a parameter in the CloudConnector.ini file to change this, and hence we need to make sure the SIP Trunk on Asterisk is configured for this. When created correctly, we can see the connection from Asterisk to the CCE Mediation component as shown below:

Before starting to configure our tenant and enabling users for CCE, we need to make sure that the DNS A record is created for our CCE Access Edge component. The DNS A record must match the FQDN that we configured for the Access Edge inside the CloudConnector.ini file and must also match the Subject Name of the SSL certificate created earlier. As mentioned in the previous post, because we are using GoDaddy DNS, the _sip._tls and _sipfederationtls._tcp SRV records have already been created automatically but if they are not, then we need to create these records manually as well:

To begin configuring our tenant, we start a remote online powershell session and run the commands to configure our tenant to use the CCE PSTN site we just deployed and enable users. This is done by running the cmdlets:

Set-CsTenantHybridConfiguration -PeerDestination <External Access Edge FQDN> -UseOnPremDialPlan $false
Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration -SharedSipAddressSpace $True

Set-CsUser -Identity "<User name>" -EnterpriseVoiceEnabled $true -HostedVoiceMail $true -OnPremLineURI <tel:+phonenumber>

Output of these commands are shown below:

Finally, we enable the user for Online Voicemail by running the cmdlet:

In terms of dial plans, all CCE users are homed in the Office365 Skype for Business cloud infrastructure and inherit a dial plan based on the user's location. For example, when we look at the user [email protected], we can see that the dial plan assigned to this user is the SG dialplan and the details of the normalization rules of this dial plan can be shown using the 'get-CsDialPlan -Identity SG' cmdlet :

These normalization rules cannot be customized at this time for CCE deployments and any necessary number manipulation should be performed by the PSTN Gateway or IP-PBX that is connected to the CCE instance. With these steps, the CCE instance is now deployed successfully and what remains is to configure the PSTN Gateway for proper PSTN incoming/outgoing calls.