Ask the Expert: Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution

[ciscomoderator]

With Chris Ward

Welcome to the Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation.This is an opportunity to learn about Cisco's new Hosted Collaboration Solution architecture and deployment with Cisco expert Chris Ward. Chris is a technical marketing engineer working on the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution. He previously held an escalation position in the Cisco Technical Assistance Center for the Cisco Unified Communications Manager team, where he worked for more than five years. Ward holds bachelor and master of science degrees in information technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology and also holds CCIE Voice certification.

Remember to use the rating system to let Chris know if you have received an adequate response. 

Chris might not be able to answer each question due to the volume expected during this event. Remember that you can continue the conversation on the Service Provider sub-community discussion forum shortly after the event. This event lasts through April 20 , 2012. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other community members.

[tenaro.gusatu.novici]

Hi Chris,

I don't know much about this solution and will appreciate if you can clarify if CUCM, which is part of solution, can be used as multitenant product or each customer requires its own CUCM inside data center? Apart from Cisco UC portfolio is there any additional unique peace of software that must be used when implementing Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution?

Is this solution something that Cisco is delivering directly to service providers (like cisco advanced services) or you can name some of Cisco partners that are doing this implementation too?

Regards,

Tenaro

[chrward]

Hi Tenaro,

Thank you for your question.

At current, we do not setup CUCM in a multi-tenant configuration. Each HCS end-customer gets their own unique CUCM cluster, the same goes for Unity Connection and Unified Presence.

There are a few pieces of software that are unique to HCS

1) HCM - F - This component is used to automate the upgrades of the UC applications, produce bundle-based billing reports from the configuration domain, and also automatically provision/configure the Service Assurance architecture so as you deploy HCS to end customers, the monitoring of those configurations is automatically done for you.

2) Prime Central for HCS Assurance - This component is responsible for provides lots of functionality in regards to monitoring the HCS solution. It aggregates data from CUOM, CUSM, DCNM, and vCenter and can display all the events/errors/alarms that those components are reporting. It also has the ability to normalize these errors and forward them to an exisitng alarm management or ticketing system via SNMP traps. It also includes a reatures like fault correlation (root cause analysis) and service impact analysis which allows you to see what services are affected based on the error information that is being reported.

3) This last item is not really a piece of software, but more an advantage over using UC on UCS as opposed to HCS. Within HCS we allow the over subscription of your UCS resources for some of the smaller OVAs where in UC on UCS you would be required to map a vCPU to an entire core. This allows for much greater denisty. Also, the HCS licensing scheme allows for the SP to pool licenses and transfer between the customers as needed where in UC on UCS, these licenses are bound to customers, once purchased.

To answer your last question, we sell HCS to service providers and partners. Partners may need to have customers bring their own PSTN connectivity or partner with an SP to provide PSTN access, but either way, partners are just as capable of providing this service.

Hope that helps. Thanks again Tenaro!

[Gustavo Hernandez]

Chris,

We are considering becoming an HCS partner but we have a home-grown conferencing application that we would want to offer to our end-customers. Would this be supported?

Kind Regards,

Lisa

[chrward]

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for your question.

Yes, you would be allowed to integrate your conferencing solution into your HCS offering. In cases like this where the HCS team has not validated the configuration or tested it in our labs, this type of integration would need to be tested and supported by you, the HCS provider/partner. The HCS SP/Partner would need to own this itegration but it would be allowed.

So while Cisco can't validate or support the integration, the partner is allowed to add this to their offering with the previously mentioned caveats.

Hope that helps. Thanks Lisa!

[myahfoufi12]

Hello,

Actually i have problem with my connection and i would like to find that problem for the connection.

i have 3 sites(1,2,3) connected together through fiber multi mode cable. The site 1 having the control room, the maximum distance between site (1 and 3) is 1.8 Km, the other distance(1 and 2) is 1.2 km and i already used 3750X switch and GIBIC GLC-FE 100Fx with support MM cable up to 2 KM.

i have in site (2 and 3) 10 cctv 3 mega pixel cameras and i check for the bandwidth is less than 100Mbps when i connected the 2 switches(2 and 3)to the switch in the site 1 there is a delay i thought maybe because of the bandwidth so i tried to connect only 1 camera but the same problem(delay).

i did not make any configuration for the switches

Can you please advise for any solution.

[chrward]

Hi Mohamad,

I think you may have posted in the wrong section. My expertise is in the Hosted Collaboration Solution and other Unified Communication topics. Perhaps you intended to post this elsewhere?

Chris Ward

[Sergey Birukov]

Hello Chris,

We would like to understartand what is the upgrade process like from 8.6.1 to 8.6.2? Is there anything in particular that we need to pay attention to?

Any details you can provide in regards this upgrade will be appreciated.

Thanks

- Sergey

[chrward]

Hi Sergey,

Thank you for your question. The upgrade process from 8.6.1 to 8.6.2 is described in detail in the HCS 8.6.2 documentation. Here is a basical outline of the order of operations for such an upgrade:

1. Cisco HCS Management Components—Service Fulfillment and Service Assurance

2. Cisco HCS Data Center and Service Provider Network Infrastructure Components

3. Cisco HCS Aggregation Layer Components and Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager Models.

After you upgrade Cisco HCS Management, DC Infrastructure, and Aggregation Layer components to the compatible Cisco HCS versions, you can continue to manage individual Cisco HCS customers that are running the previous Cisco HCS Solution versions of Cisco Unified Communications applications since the upgraded components are backward compatible.

4. Customer-Specific Unified Communications Applications and Services. This can be accomplished using the Platform Manager component of HCM-F which allows administratotrs to schedule and automate the upgrades of the all the UC applications.

I hope this helps Sergey!

Chris