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Maximum Particpants for Conference Now

Justin Winter
Level 1
Level 1

Hello,

 

I'm trying to figure out the maximum amount of participants one can have in one conference? I've been trying to research this, but Cisco doesn't seem to provide any documentation. Today I was made aware that I couldn't get more than 48 users into a single conference. I believe I have fixed that by going into "Service Parameters" -> Selecting my Server -> Service - Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming App. I changed the call count to I believe the max of 250 (actual 256 according to CUCM). I am running Cisco Business Edition 7000 and my cluster is ran in VM's. CUCM version 11.5.

 

So what it comes down to is, how many users can I get into one single conference? Do I need to spin up a dedicated VM subscriber just for Conferencing/Media Resources? If anyone can answer or point me into the direction of this information I would certainly appreciate it. Thanks!

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

All the information you're looking for, you can get directly from your server if you click on help for the options:

This parameter specifies the maximum number of conference participants that the conference bridge will support. Increasing this value above the recommended default may cause performance degradation on a Cisco Unified Communications Manager that is running on the same server. If you need to increase this value above the default, you should consider installing the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming Application on a separate server.
  This is a required field.
  Default: 48
  Minimum:  0
  Maximum:  256

 

The help for the maximum ad-hoc and meet-me parameters lists what are the maximum for each one.

Can you go above the default 48 streams without causing issues??? no way to tell you as there are far too many variables and depends on average/maximum load from the server, available resources, etc.

If you have a dedicated server with just IPVMS, then yes, go and set it to 256 without worries.

 

Now, resource allocation is static. So, if you have a CFB with 256 streams, and you set the value to 64 participants, you can do 4 conferences, and anyone trying another ad-hoc, meet-me or conference-now would get an error as there are no more resources. AND they are shared with ad-hoc conferencing. Even if you can go as high as 128 participants, it's not practical as you'd use all the resources with just a handful of conferences.

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

View solution in original post

11 Replies 11

Rejohn Cuares
Level 4
Level 4

Conference Now uses the MeetMe function. Cisco documentation says that it can support up to a maximum of 128 participants. However, I would say that this number is subject to UC deployment options which has different vCPU and vRAM allocations (i.e. 1000 users, 2500 users, etc.). This is true if your using the CUCM's software conference resource. You could probably get the maximum (128 participants) if you would use hardware conference resource.

 

HTH.

 

 

Please rate replies and mark question as "answered" if applicable.

Thank you for your response. Is it safe to say I can increase the number of participants if I had dedicated subscribers for that feature?

All the information you're looking for, you can get directly from your server if you click on help for the options:

This parameter specifies the maximum number of conference participants that the conference bridge will support. Increasing this value above the recommended default may cause performance degradation on a Cisco Unified Communications Manager that is running on the same server. If you need to increase this value above the default, you should consider installing the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming Application on a separate server.
  This is a required field.
  Default: 48
  Minimum:  0
  Maximum:  256

 

The help for the maximum ad-hoc and meet-me parameters lists what are the maximum for each one.

Can you go above the default 48 streams without causing issues??? no way to tell you as there are far too many variables and depends on average/maximum load from the server, available resources, etc.

If you have a dedicated server with just IPVMS, then yes, go and set it to 256 without worries.

 

Now, resource allocation is static. So, if you have a CFB with 256 streams, and you set the value to 64 participants, you can do 4 conferences, and anyone trying another ad-hoc, meet-me or conference-now would get an error as there are no more resources. AND they are shared with ad-hoc conferencing. Even if you can go as high as 128 participants, it's not practical as you'd use all the resources with just a handful of conferences.

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

Thank you for the reply. So it sounds like I need to add additional servers that are dedicated to conferencing to support more than a thousand users for one conference.

If you need that many users in a single conference, what you need is either CMS, or to use WebEx or some other broadcast mechanism.

I've never seen a real conference with that many users, if you need that many people watching/hearing something, you usually use a broadcast mechanism or use conference center in WebEx to make sure only the presenters can talk, and you don't have 1000 open mics and sources of noise and people talking over each other.

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

Thank you for the response. The purpose of the amount of users are for all hands meetings, and would strictly be using voice only. So I don't need to worry about video, for now. I will take a look into the CMS however to see if it would be appropriate for our business use. Thanks.

I don't mean CMS for video, you'll need it for audio if you want that many people.

A meet-me/Conference-now can only have 128 users. You can add as many resources as you want, but that's the hard limit in CUCM.

You'll need CMS to have people dial directly to CMS to join the meeting.

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

The limit is per CUCM server, correct? So, if I have 1x Pub, 2x Subs, I could theoretically handle up to 768 total participants?

Yes, but changing the maximum streams to 256 should only be done in servers which are dedicated to only running IPVMS and nothing else.

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

Hi Jaime

 

In the feature configuration guide, its mentioned that "Maximum number of simultaneous Conference Now and MeetMe conference instances combined together is 100 per Unified Communications Manager CallManager node."

 

Does that mean that if we have 1 publisher and 3 subscriber, so that we could host 300 simultaneous conferences? 

How do we specify the nodes in the configuration?

Number of conferences is based on your actual conferencing resources and number of conferencees for ad-hoc and meet-me, do the math in your deployment based on what you have

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate
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