"Hoot n Holler over IP"

[admin_2]

I am referring to "Cisco Hoot and Holler over IP" document. I intend to present this to customer by installing Cisco 1760-V(with E&M) on their trading floors in 5 Asian location and riding on the IP WAN. However I need to think of some workaround here as the IP WAN doesn't IP multicast currently, but it seems the whole idea behind Hoot over IP is by IP multicast!

I wonder whether building full mesh "GRE tunneling" between 5 locations can help here. Also there seems to be no obvious definition in this application for "source", "receiver" or "RP" as in the multicast story.

Appreciate if you could shed me more light. Thanks.

[bchoi]

While the 1760-V supports the Hoot and Holler application, the core network needs to be IP multicast enabled. This is because the Hoot and Holler over IP application is based on multicast. One of the advantages of multicast is that it can scale, allowing large deployment of multiple endpoints.

The RP can be any site but typically is the headquarter.

Not sure if the "GRE tunneling" scheme would work properly here, since the Cisco Hoot and Holler solution needs to have multicast groups defined in the configuration.

[taawongbe]

I agree. You need to have IP multicast enabled for Cisco Hoot and Holler to work.

We had similar problem where one of our clients had 4 seperate locations and wanted to use our software based Hoot and Holler solution with their Cisco 2600 router. They implemented GRE and it worked. A lot of time was spent on this tho.

[geoff.belknap]

Hoot and Holler over IP works inside GRE however solid QoS becomes a challenge. Your class-maps need to provide enough bandwidth for: "Codec Bandwidth + IP Overhead + GRE Overhead * 3" (The DSP will not mix more than the 3 loudest signals). We found that even with the right amount of bandwidth reserved, sometimes Hoot inside GRE would break up.

Also you won't need a full mesh, to make your life easy build your tunnels directly to an RP or an RP mapping agent.

In 2-way hoot and holler, everyone is a source and a receiver. You'll want an S,G for each location to ensure full 2-way communication for every location.