QMS Recording Service

The Recording service must be connected to an audio source for the calls that it records. This source is typically a network switch that supports mirroring of ports from one or more network switches, or mirroring of virtual LANs (VLANs), where the mirror port is connected to a dedicated secondary network interface card residing in the server running the Recording Service. Some PBX systems can operate without requiring network switch mirroring in some circumstances. Those are:

When network mirroring is being used as the audio source, it is important to make sure that all of the sources of RTP (real-time protocol) packets, for calls that need to be recorded, are included as part of mirroring configuration. For example, if the customer only needs to record inbound and outbound calls to and from the public telephone network then the mirroring configuration can be as simple as copying all packets going to or coming from the voice gateway or PBX (whichever is connected to physical trunks). If internal calls need to be recorded in addition to external calls, the mirroring configuration can be a bit more complicated as it requires the packets going to and from every recorded phone device to be copied to the mirror port on the network switch. For larger deployments, that usually involves either using network switches that support VLAN mirroring or mirroring a series of chained-together switches to a single mirror port.

The following audio codec payloads can be captured:

Final recordings are saved as single or dual-channel .opus files with Opus encoded audio or.mp3 files with MP3 encoded audio.

A source of real-time phone call events is also required by the Call Recording service. The call events tell the Call Recording service information about a phone call such as which parties are involved in the call and when the call starts and ends. The source of these events is highly dependent on which PBX system is being used and in some cases there is more than one option available for a given PBX system.

The required event sources for each PBX system are as follows.

If more than one type of PBX system is deployed in the customer environment then separate Call Recording Services should be deployed for each PBX type. In some cases, Call Recordings services can be deployed at remote sites to handle Call Recording for the users at those sites.

The Recording Service can be run in both VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V server virtualization environments. Live server migration systems, such as VMWare vSphere vMotion, should not be used. Virtual machines must have a dedicated MAC address on all virtual network adapters that must not change.

When network mirroring is being used as the call audio source and/or call event source, the virtual machine must have a virtual network adapter that is bound to a physical network adapter on the host machine. The physical network adapter must then be plugged into the mirror port on the network switch and that adapter must not be used by any other virtual machine on the host system. Promiscuous mode support must be enabled in the physical-to-virtual adapter binding settings. This option is not available with all versions of Microsoft Hyper-V so and additional software component called the QMS Packet Forwarding Service is required in that case.

The QMS Packet Forwarding Service is a service that is installed on Hyper-V host machines and can be installed on both GUI and Server Core installations of Windows. The Packet Forwarding Service listens for packets on a dedicated network capture card that is plugged into a network port mirror. The service filters out all packets except for those necessary for recording and forwards them to the destination address of the QMS Recording Service. See QMS Packet Forwarding Service Installation Guide for more details.

Servers running the Call Recording Service must meet the following requirements.