TMS Booking with MCU Cascading

[Tinnakorn Mukudomlarp]

Hi,

My customer have some questions about booking in TMS, they have 2 MCUs (4205,5320), CTS endpoints and TMS 14.2

They want to use 5320 as the main confernce for booking but if resource on 5320 is not enough for booking then automatic cascade 4205 to expand the capacity.

I found in the TMS admin guide about distribution routing (least cost routing and best impression) but I'm not sure this feature meet the above requirement.

The admin guide also said "Using different models of MCU in a cascade when manually configuring cascading is not supported in Cisco TMS"

Note sure does it means cascading different model of MCU in TMS is not supported?

Anyone try this before please advice.

Thank you.

Regards,

Tinnakorn

[Kjetil Ree]

When scheduling the conference, the user must to manually select two MCUs to setup the conference. [...]

That's not entirely correct: TMS selects the the necessary MCUs for the user once he has chosen a distribution algorithm.

-Kjetil

[Paulo Souza]

I was just trying to say that user must to add two MUCs when selecting the participants. The user simply select two MCUs and TMS will setup a basic cascade automatically.

Paulo Souza

[Kjetil Ree]

Yes, that's true.

-Kjetil

[Paulo Souza]

They want to use 5320 as the main confernce for booking but if resource on 5320 is not enough for booking then automatic cascade 4205 to expand the capacity.

Let me add one more tip about your need. The best way to have automatic cascade is by using Cisco Telepresence Conductor. When you have Cisco Conductor working together with TMS, you schedule a meeting in TMS and select Conductor as MCU. When the scheduled conference starts, Cisco Conductor can check all MCUs available to see which of them have more available ports, then it can selects the most available MCU to use when the conference starts. If there is need to cascade two MCUs to connect all the participants, Conductor can automatically make the cascade without any manual intervention.

When you have a scenario where you have MCUs being used for scheduling and being used for Adhoc conferences, Conductor is the best option. Because, as Kjetil said, TMS reserves the ports only considering scheduled conferences, it does not has visibility of the real availability of each MCU, but Conductor does, with Conductor you have intelligent resource selection and optimization.

Cisco Telepresence offers a lot of another features, please, watch this short video to learn more about Conductor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-C7F2fTEYE

=)

Regards

Paulo Souza

[Tinnakorn Mukudomlarp]

Hi Paulo,

Thank you for your advice, I'll update this to my customer.

Regards,

Tinnakorn

[Paulo Souza]

Hi Tinnakorn, you are welcome!

I think that Kjetil has answered correctly to your question, I suggest you to mark his answer as "right answer" just to close the topic.

Regards

Paulo Souza