Deploying the Virtual Room Connector

VRC (Virtual Room Connector) is an on-premises gateway for H.323 and SIP devices that allows them to communicate with each other. It is possible to join a Zoom Meeting by making a video call to a VRC using a H.323 or SIP device.

A VRC installation can be done on a private cloud as a virtual machine. As the VRC is part of your internal network, Zoom meetings can be joined from any SIP/H.323 device that is connected to your internal network. In addition, the VRC is located on your external network, so one can use external SIP/H.323 devices to access Zoom Meetings (however, 1-1 NAT or Port Forwarding can be set up on your network so that the VRC remains behind the firewall, but still accessible externally).

With the Virtual Room Connector, you can deploy it onto any virtualization platform that supports OVF, such as VMware ESXi, VirtualBox, and AWS EC2.

• The VMware products include VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, VMware VSphere
• This report is based on Nutanix (tested with Nutanix AHV and ESXi (AOS 5.5.5)).
• The support provided by Virtual Box (best-effort) is not exhaustive.

Here you can find the specifications of the virtual machine.

The prerequisites for the deployment of the Virtual Room Connector are the following:

• The following H.323/SIP platforms have been tested: Polycom, Cisco Tandberg, Lifesize, Panasonic and Aver.  If you are interested in testing other platforms, please contact us as we may have limited testing done on others.
• Cisco, Biscotti, TelyLab, and TelyLab have all been tested with SIP. You may contact us directly if you wish to know whether we’ve tested others.
• The specifications of the VM system can be found here.
• The business plan, education plan or API plan can be found here.
• Subscriptions to Room Connector ports can be found here. There is no difference in price between the Cloud Room Connector port and the Virtual Room Connector port.
• This is thanks to Zoom’s sales team.

How to deploy the Virtual Room Connector

1. If you have access to the Zoom web portal, then click on the H.323/SIP Room Connector tab, then click on the Virtual Room Connector tab.
2. Click on the Virtual Room Connector tab under Download & Token.
3. A file called OVF and a file called VMFK will be downloaded.
4. Using your virtual machine client, open the files and deploy them.
5. You will need to log in with the following credentials once the virtual machine has been started:
   • Username: admin
   • Password: Passwords will be generated randomly on startup, but you can set a password that won’t appear on startup, so that it won’t be displayed.
6. In order to find out the IP address of the server, run the command ifconfig. It might be necessary to configure an IP address manually if the server does not have one.
7. Navigate to https://ipaddress:5480 in your browser to access the web console
8. and log in using the default credentials. Change your password after logging in for the first time.
9. Click on the Configure tab, and then click the following:
   • In the Zoom web console, on the Virtual Room Connector page, you need to enter the token that you received.
   • Then you can select the mode that you want to use.
   • To do that, you will need to enter the IPv4 address of the VRC.
   • Make sure you choose at least one connection.
   • Enter the IPv4 address of controller 1 and the controller 2 into the boxes below.
10. If you would like to set up an H.323 gatekeeper, please select Enable H.323 register under H.323 Settings.
11. (Optional) If you want to set up SIP registrar settings, you need to select Enable SIP register in the SIP settings menu.
12. It is optional, but you can upload new certificate and key files by selecting Replace Certificate under Certificate Settings.
13. When you are finished, click the Submit button.

The Virtual Room Connector has the following dial strings

If you are connecting from a H.323 device, please enter the following:

• IP Address only, then enter the meeting ID on the welcome screen, or
• IP Address##Meeting ID, for example: 192.168.3.142##213746932
• IP Address##MeetingID#password: 192.168.3.142##213746932#1122
• MeetingID@IP Address: 2139746932@192.168.3.142 [Some Cisco/Tandberg devices]

If you are using a SIP device, enter the following:

• IP Address only, then enter the meeting ID on the welcome screen, or
• Meeting ID@IP Address, for example: 213746932@192.168.3.142
• Meetingid.password@ip or meetingid:password@ip

A change of your Admin login password can be made at any time

1. Click Login in the Virtual Machine.
2. You will be prompted to enter the administrative credentials.
3. From the User menu, click Manage.
4. You will be able to change the password for the admin account by clicking Change Password.
5. Delete your existing Admin password, then type in your new password, and confirm it by entering it again.
   
6. Click on Modify.