A co-worker had a secure Cisco VoIP Phone that he wanted to use in remote locations. The phone had to connect to the call manager on our confidential company network. Normally we would use a small industrial router to form the IPsec tunnel to our servers and allow the VoIP to register. Unfortunately we were out of routers, but we did have small servers (think NUC) running ESXi. Knowing we only needed a phone call, I hoped that trial license on Cisco’s CSR1000v cloud router would give us sufficient bandwidth.
I loaded up the VPN configuration into the CSR1000v and was excited to see it form neighbors with the other routers in our confidential network. After that I hooked up the VoIP phone, which promptly registered and made successful calls. The next step was nothing special but neat to see the extended architecture. My co-worker needed the audio line to connect a hardware encryptor so that he could send a secure serial data stream to a receiver on the other network. Once keys were loaded and the call placed, we started to see the serial data streaming in. It’s a great feeling to solve real problems with the tools available.