Conductor and TMS Booking Issue

[Simon Battye]

Hi,

After installing Cisco TelePresence Conductor and associating my MCU's to bridge pools etc, i've noticed that i am not able to select any MCU's when i schedule a call via the TMS booking portal.

Under the MCU tab i don't see any of my MCU's that where there before but if i purge on of these MCU's and then add it back into systems navigator, it works OK.

I'm able to do this for some of my MCU's but there are a couple i can't due to the amount of conferences already scheduled and if i purge i presume i will loose all these.

Has anyone come across this before? Is there a work-around apart from purging the MCU's?

Thanks, Simon

[Martin Koch]

Dont have an answer, but it might be handy if you have your version numbers of

TMS, (VCS,) MCU and Conductor.

[Simon Battye]

Martin,

software versions are:

TMS - 13.2.1

VCS-C - X7.2

VCS-E - X7.2

4515 MCU - 4.3(1.68)

Conductor - XC2.1

[Simon Battye]

Martin,

I also seem to have lost the ability to change/edit settings for these MCU's in systems navigator and i'm missing the TMS scheduling settings uder here too.

Thanks, Simon

[Martin Koch]

Do you have the chance to see (like in a lab) if it works for you with TMS14.2.2

Do you also use OpenDS or why did you not upgrade to TMS14.x?

[Martin Koch]

Btw, as the MCU itself is managed by the conductor and that is an exclusive thing it does not

sound that wrong how it behaves. Not sure if multiple booking aliases to reflect geo location

is supported by TMS

[Simon Battye]

Martin,

I don't have access to a lab at the moment.

I know the MCU is managed by Conductor but surely it shouldn't reduce the management paramaters from TMS, in this case conductor is requiered for 'ad-hoc' calls but TMS is required for scheduled calls.

[Simon Battye]

Ok,

So it looks like TMS removed these settings because i added the conductor into systems navigator so i could have visibility of it.

My thoughts on this was that TMS would give you an option as to how you wanted to schedule your meetings.

Thanks, Simon

[Martin Koch]

In theory it would be nice yes, but check out the admin guide for example:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/telepresence/infrastructure/conductor/admin_guide/Cisco_TelePresence_Conductor_Admin_Guide_XC2-1.pdf

all conference bridges used by the TelePresence Conductor are reserved for its exclusive use and are not 
used by any other system, 

So direct booking of an mcu should not be there, but booking of specfic pools would be handy, ...

[Paulo Souza]

Hi Simon,

The issue you are facing is an expected behavior when using Conductor. You should make all the configuration on the Conductor and not on the MCU directly, as well as you should not be able select a specific MCU when scheduling a conference.

The main reason of using Conductor is to centralize MCU selection and configuration, so that you don't need to manually manage your MCUs, you set all you want in Conductor and Conductor sets it on the selected MCU to host de conference. Following this logic, there is no reason to TMS allow you to manage and schedule your MCUs directly, once Conductor is already making this job.

Regards

Paulo Souza

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

[Martin Koch]

Yea, thats what I said before, ...

but his problem is that TMS does not really support the capabilities of the conductor, ...

[Magnus Ohm]

Hi

If you go to the MCU in systems navigator and click settings edit settings there is a checkbox at the bottom sayin "allow booking" if this is not checked it will not be visible in the booking interface.

/Magnus

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[Simon Battye]

Magnus,

The 'TMS scheduling settings' section on the MCU in systems navigator was not visible. this disapeared once the conductor was added.

Thanks, Simon

[Kjetil Ree]

software versions are:
TMS - 13.2.1
[...]
Conductor - XC2.1

This is a very much unsupported combination. The TMS release where we announced Conductor support was 14.1.

After installing Cisco TelePresence Conductor and associating my MCU's to bridge pools etc, i've noticed that i am not able to select any MCU's when i schedule a call via the TMS booking portal.

Expected behavior. You cannot have your bridges behind a Conductor and still schedule them directly in TMS.

Under the MCU tab i don't see any of my MCU's that where there before but if i purge on of these MCU's and then add it back into systems navigator, it works OK.

If you see that in TMS >= 14.1, and the MCUs don't become unbookable again after a force refresh of the Conductor, we have a TMS bug. If you see it in a TMS version that doesn't support the Conductor... Well, I guess behavior is undefined then.

Sorry Simon, there is no way of achieving what you want.

Regards,

Kjetil

[Simon Battye]

Kjetil,

Thanks for confirming this.

It would be good to have an optionenables you to add Conductor into TMS for purely management only and not just for call scheduling, i.e change basic config and monitor network connectivity over SNMP.

In this scenario, having Conductor in TMS is not essential as all conductor calls will be ad-hoc and not scheduled; so i have removed it from systems navigator and i have full control of the MCU's again.

When i get a chance i'll set this up in a lab with 14.1 and see what results i get.

Regards, Simon