Difference between Gatekeeper vs SME

[news2010a]

Hi, folks I see that Gatekeeper primary functions are "adminssion control, zone management and E.164 address translation".

Gatekeepers are logically separated from *H.323* endpoints such as terminals and gateways".

Question:
1)So does UCM SME operate only separating H.323 as well only?

Is this a difference between SME and Gatekeeper

2) Is Gatekeeper terminology/function going away and replaced by SME instead?

[clileikis]

Hi there,

SME supports both H323 and SIP signaling, whereas H323 Gatekeepers do not support SIP signaling.  Gatekeepers are also a 'stateless' technology, basically meaning that once they set up the call, they are out of the picture.  SME is a stateful technology, and they are active and are with the entire call from start to finish.  The idea is that with SME, you get all of the benefits CUCM has to offer (ease of management of 1000's of patterns, GUI based, etc, CUCM cluster redundancy) and although H323 Gatekeepers support a lot of the same functionality, from a managability perspective it can be pretty tedious.  Cisco seems to be pushing SIP pretty hard these days and a lot of their efforts are going towards SIP, so I would expect to see SME with SIP gaining a lot of ground on Gatekeepers.

HTH,

Chris

[news2010a]

Thanks

Hey, does the term "stateful" in IP telephony would mean that if an active call gets dropped which could be restablished (maintained by another CUCM box for example if high availability is setup?).

[clileikis]

Yes that's correct, you can expect the same stateful failover that you would get from CUCM in CUCM SME.  That includes call preservation during node failures.  SME is basically CUCM, but only allows trunks to be configured, no endpoints.

HTH,

Chris

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[balaji.babu1]

Dear  clileikis

Need you response   on next version of  cisco Global gatekeeper  as our current cisco Global gatekeeper(2951)  is single point of failure and running on end of life router. call manager version is 10.5
 
 Gatekeeper is being used  to group gateways into logical zones and perform call routing between three region cluster

what is the replacement product for 2951 gatekeeper ? can we replace gatekeepr with sme ? 

regards

bala