Calling yourself from one PC using Virtual PC for Windows 7

A problem I've found it trying to call myself from one phone to another and only having one PC.
VM's have worked in the past for the Office Communicator client, but not for using VOICE.

With Windows 7 - I finally had to give up on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.   There are some workarounds to get it to to work, but there are even more issues afterwards.   

The workaround for this turns out to be Virtual PC for Windows 7, if you can meet the hefty requirements. 

From : http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/requirements.aspx

•  Hardware Virtualization Technology enabled
• 1 GHz 32-bit / 64-bit processor required
• Memory (RAM)  -  2GB memory or higher recommended
• Recommended 15 GB hard disk space per virtual Windows environment
• Supported host operating system:

 VT was not required for Virtual PC 2007, but if you have it you also get the one more thing:  USB support.   (Two more things if you were using Virtual Server 2005 - USB and Sound)

 

With this option, it is possible to plug in an 8501 soft-phone and assign it to your Virtual PC.  Then you can simply assign it to the virtual machine.

 

 

Go through Tools / Set up Audio and Video in Office Communicator and you can now call yourself using a single PC using Virtual PC.

 

This is also useful for when you have your ip8540 / cx700 attached to your PC because it allows you to easily test a soft-phone without having to unplug the other. 

Changing VLANs for Tanjay (CX700 / ip8540) phones

The only info from Microsoft on how to set the VLAN on a Tanjay phone I could find was fromt he Communicator Phone Edition Relase notes:

From "Communicator_Phone_Edition_2007_Release_Notes"

IT administrators can configure VLAN by following below instructions:

1. At startup, Communicator Phone Edition sends a DHCP request to the native VLAN
     o Communicator Phone Edition sends Vendor ID option "60" with value "CPE-OCPhone"
     o Communicator Phone Edition requests Vendor Specific Option parameter "43"

2. The DHCP server responds with a native VLAN address and standard options. It must also respond with the Vendor Specific parameters:
    o Vendor Specific Option "10" should be set to the VLAN ID.
            Communicator Phone Edition will store the VLAN ID and immediately release the address lease.
            Communicator Phone Edition will make a new DHCP request, with the packet's VLAN ID set to the ID specified in step 2.

---

After struggling a bit and taking some network traces - there was on error in the instructions - the Tanjay phones look for "CPE-OCPHONE" - and case does matter for the ID.

If you are using Microsoft's DHCP, here are some steps.

1) Create a Vendor Class by right-clicking on the name of the server and selecting  "Define Vendor Classes"

2) Click on Add
3) Display name can be anything - I put in "Microsoft Phone Edition"
4) Description can be anything as well - I used "VLAN Tagging"
5) On the right hand side under "ASCII" - put in     "CPE-OCPHONE"

When done, it should look like the above.

And now you have a Vendor class for your phones.

The next step is to edit the Class, and add the option 10 code for the VLAN.


1) Right click on the server name, and pick “Pre-defined options”.
2) Pick the “Microsoft Phone Edition” class
3) Click on “Add” and put in anything for name and description
4) Make sure the type is set to “WORD” (default is byte)
5) Make sure the code is “10”
6) Leave the default value to blank or the most common VLAN being used by phones

The final step is to add the option to scope optiosn for the subnets where phones need to be moved.  
 
I've noticed that some phones required to be hard reset (reset button) rather than just powered down to get the new address, but YMMV.