Device Pool Best Practices

[JaredWhitman]

I am soon taking over a rather large CUCM Cluster.  Before this transition the current Admin is creating device pools per building.  There 100's of buildings off this cluster.  I can understand the granularity of this control but is this a good practice?  I am wondering about the Cons of this setup?

[jolson3197]

To answer your question I would say it depends.  I am all for simplifying where possible but some things to consider when you are determining your device pool strategy would be the following.

Number of users per site, size and geographic location of the cluster, the timezones your sites reside, languages at each site, bandwidth considerations between sites, your company's DR strategy and how you plan to manage them after they are implemented.

Weigh in on all of those considerations and that will help guide you to a solution.

[Chris Deren]

There are usually couple of strategies on deciding how to build the device pools I have encountered:

1. Use DP as a template (that is the intent), if all settings are the same between phones i.e. Region, Location, CM Group, SLRG, etc.  use the same DP for those phones. This reduces the amount of device pools needed (my preference). If any of the settings need to be different you have to use separate DP.

2. If more administrative control is needed, i.e. reset groups of phones at specific time, pull devices into another external application via AXL by device pool, search devices by common field i.e. DP then separating them by device pool is often desirable. 

[Yort Mantup · Accepted solution]

It was helpful for me to separate them out.  We have over 80 sites and as Chris referenced, I use these as template for each site where I am assigning SRST, MRG list and which CM group this sites phone are jointed to. If they were all the same, then I would definitely simplify it.  Separating them out for me eliminates the need to configure this at the phone level and allows me to make a change at the DP level vs doing Bulk Admin.  

[Prabudh]

If we reset device will it reset all associated devices to which the device pool is associated with?

[TechLvr]

@Prabudh Yes. The reset button under the device pool is actually there for convenience to reset all devices that use that particular device pool. It does not reset the device pool itself as it does not need a reset.