Advice deployment new B7K units

[michelberben]

Hi all,

this is my first post on this Cisco VoIP forum as I am a newcomer to the field with a Cisco networking and security background. 

At the moment I am tasked to deploy Cisco VoIP for our company for which we bought 2 B7K units and 2 Cubes. 

We have 2 data centers, connected by layer 2 at our disposal. 

My first question is how you would deploy these 2 B7K units and Cubes for best performance and redundancy ? Would you have 2 separate clusters or create one cluster spanning both DC's ? 

Secondly, as we are talking a deployment for less than 5k users, I am following Cisco's "Preferred Architecture for Enterprise Collaboration 11". Based on that, I was thinking of a 5 server cluster - 1 publisher (no call processing), 1 pair of dedicated TFTP subscribers (also call-processing) and 1 pair of call-processing subscribers running the IPVMS service (but no tftp). I read it is not advised to run the IPVMS and TFTP services on the same node. How would you distribute the services over the different clusternodes ? 

Finally, how would you guys distribute these nodes over both DC's (if going the single cluster route is best) ?

thanks, 

Michel

[Rajan]

Hi Michel,

Its better to have a singel cluster with all these servers distributed across both DCs. Also you might not need two dedicated servers for TFTP unless the load will be very high. Regarding the placement of servers, make sure that you are placing subscribers to which the phones will be registering (call processing servers) equally distributed across 2 DCs for redundancy.

HTH

Rajan

[Rajan]

However if you want to go with this 5 server architecture, the servers can be placed as given below:

DC 1:

Pub

TFTP 1

Sub 1

DC 2:

TFTP 2

Sub 2