Mark Holloway

The Acme Packet SBC is now available in a Server Edition that runs on HP DL series servers. The platform is based on the same C-Series code that is used in the 3800 and 4500 appliances and runs on an Acme Packet optimized Linux kernel. There are some configuration elements that vary between the Server Edition and the appliances.

When configuring the PHY and NETWORK interfaces on the Server Edition it is important to verify the four physical Ethernet ports on the Server Edition correspond appropriately to wancom0, wancom1, s0p0, and s1p0. In most cases when installing Server Edition the Linux kernel will map wancom0 and wancom1 to the on-board Ethernet ports on the HP server appropriately. The Server Edition is equipped with an additional HP NC360T dual-port NIC providing two additional Ethernet ports that support s0p0 and s0p1. These are considered the Media interfaces which support SIP, H323, and RTP traffic. The wancom0 port supports platform management and wancom1 supports Active/Standby stateful synchronization when running two Server Editions as a High Availability pair.

To begin, the first step is to see what MAC address maps to which SBC interface.

In this case the MAC addresses identified in the HP server BIOS correctly match the respective wancom and media ports. When deploying in a simplex (non-HA) model, wancom1 is not going to be used since there is no Standby unit to replicate to. The Server Edition has the ability to support additional media interfaces if more physical Ethernet ports are added to the server. Also, for those familiar with the 3800/4500 and the use of wancom1 and wancom2 for redundant back-to-back connections between the Active and Standby nodes, the Server Edition does have the ability to support wancom1 and wancom2 for replication as well. It’s just a matter of adding more NIC ports. By default, with four physical ethernet ports on the server, only wancom1 is used for replication to the Standby which is still very adequate.

In the event the physical ports on the server do not map as desired, it is very easy to identify and reassign ports.

When entering the locate command the SBC will begin to rapidly blink the physical port that corresponds to s0p0 making it easy to indentify. To change the assignment just use the swap command.

Once this command is executed the s0p0 and s1p0 interface are reassigned.  To change the description use the label command.

The following is additional configuration output provided for the purpose of showing configuration completeness. Note in this case the Server Edition is connected to Cisco 3750 switches and is operating at 100MB Full Duplex.