What's new in version 16?

You can deploy your Pexip Infinity system as either a mix of Proxying Edge Nodes and Transcoding Conferencing Nodes, or as a system that only contains Transcoding Conferencing Nodes.

A typical deployment scenario is to use Proxying Edge Nodes as a front for many privately-addressed Transcoding Conferencing Nodes. Those outward-facing proxying nodes would receive all the signaling and media from endpoints and other external systems, and then forward that media onto other internally-located transcoding nodes to perform the standard Pexip Infinity transcoding, gatewaying and conferencing hosting functions.

(Proxying Edge Nodes were previously available as technology preview in version 15.)

Deploying Pexip Infinity on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Two new security features provide resistance to malicious attempts to break in to your Pexip Infinity system:

• PIN brute force resistance: this temporarily blocks all access to a VMR that receives a significant number of incorrect PIN entry attempts.
• VOIP scanner resistance: this temporarily blocks service access attempts from any source IP address that dials a significant number of incorrect aliases in a short period.

These two options (Platform configuration > Global settings) are enabled by default on upgrade to version 16.

Security best practices

The interactive live view graph showing the status of the Pexip Infinity platform can be rewound and replayed to show historical status for the last 7 days.

Graphs for any current or historic conference can also be viewed and replayed. This allows you, for example, to see when participants and Conferencing Nodes joined or disconnected from the conference.

Rewinding and replaying status

Viewing current conference status

The VMR Scheduling for Exchange feature now supports environments with more than one Exchange server. To do this, a new Exchange domain configuration option has been added; one Exchange domain must be configured for each Exchange server in your deployment.

For customers upgrading to v16, the FQDN used in the EWS URL will automatically be added as the first Exchange domain.

About PINs, Hosts and Guests

Configuring Virtual Meeting Rooms

You can now configure the length of time that:

• participants can remain at the PIN entry stage
• guest participants can remain in the waiting room.

Participants will be disconnected automatically after the configured time.

Limiting how long Guests can wait for a Host

The following improvements and modifications have been made to VMR and device provisioning:

• When performing an LDAP sync of devices, you can now optionally sync any disabled AD items. This allows you to create device aliases for conference rooms/resources which typically have disabled AD accounts/mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange.
• There is more flexible alias handling when provisioning VMRs via LDAP:
  • VMR aliases can now be tagged as overridable. This allows you to manually add further aliases to a provisioned VMR.
  • You can now provision up to 8 aliases per VMR (previously 4).

In previous versions, syslog servers received both support log and Linux audit log entries. In version 16, you can control which of the following logs are sent to a particular syslog server:

• support log
• audit log
• web server log.

There are new TLS certificate management features:

• Ability to download individual TLS certificates. Note that if you are using LDAP authentication, there is a new permission "May download TLS private key" that must be assigned to the account role to enable the administrator to download a certificate's private key.
• You can create a certificate signing request (CSR) for existing installed certificates, for example if you need to replace a certificate that is due to expire.

Version 16 of Pexip Infinity supports Safari version 11 (WebRTC).

Note that Safari version 11 will not work with Pexip Infinity version 15 or earlier.

When configuring a system location you can now specify a Transcoding location. This lets you define the system location to handle media transcoding for calls (signaling) received in, or sent from, that location.

On upgrade to version 16, the Transcoding location defaults to This location for any existing locations — this default means that transcoding is performed by a Transcoding Conferencing Node in the same location as where the call signaling is being handled, as per previous behavior. This new setting is intended for use in locations that contain Proxying Edge Nodes so that you can specify the location (and thus the Transcoding Conferencing Nodes) to where media will be proxied for transcoding purposes.

This release contains the following administrative improvements and modifications:

• The ability to mute all Guests in a VMR (via Status > Conferences).
• New Status > Alarm History page shows all historic alarms including the severity level, and the time the alarm was raised and lowered. This information is also available via the management history API.
• New Status > Conferencing Node History page shows all events (stop, start or running) that have been applied to overflow Conferencing Nodes. This information is also available via the management history API.
• The ability to disable the management web interface session timeout for inactive users (Platform configuration > Global settings > Enable management web interface session timeout).
• When configuring a Virtual Reception, the Lync / Skype for Business fields used for configuring IVR gateway routing to Lync/SfB meetings are now in the main settings (previously they were in the Advanced options).
• When configuring a Call Routing Rule's Call target, the Lync / Skype for Business meeting direct (not via Virtual Reception) option is now called Lync / Skype for Business meeting direct (Conference ID in dialed alias).
• Searching / filtering is now supported on the Conferencing Node status and Conferencing Node configuration pages.
• The service count on the Themes page now includes any Call Routing Rules that use that theme (in addition to VMRs).
• When using the management API, configured services and Call Routing Rules can be filtered by theme (using a filter criteria of ivr_theme).

The following improvements and modifications have been made to external and local policy:

• The response for service configuration policy for Virtual Meeting Rooms and Virtual Auditoriums supports new guests_can_present and primary_owner_email_address elements.
• There is a new request parameter / call_info variable of trigger which indicates the trigger for the policy request, for example "invite", "options" and so on.
• Local policy scripts can use a new pex_in_subnet filter to test whether a participant's address is within one or more subnets.
• The call_direction request parameter / call_info variable now reports a value of "non_dial" instead of "None" (when policy is triggered by requests that are not related to incoming or outgoing call setup).
• External policy requests now support Basic Authentication and basic ASCII-encoded username and password credentials. Previously Pexip Infinity encoded the credentials to UTF-8. There should be no impact on any existing policy server configuration after upgrading to version 16 providing basic ASCII characters were used for the credentials.