Telepresence Deployment

[samath.ith]

Hi all,

I was wondering how many people deploy Telepresence as a stand alone network with its own call manager cluster.

Also is there a large group of people that deploy Telepresence and IP telephones on the same call manager cluster.

Thanks,

Sam

[Justin Ferello]

Sam,

It is a requirement to have Immersive systems on a seperate cluster according to Cisco.  Not sure how they feel about the regular endpoints though.  I would venture to say they always need to be seperated.

Thanks,

Justin

[George Thomas]

I dont think that is quite the case anymore. In the past, Cisco wasnt able to tag Telepresence traffic as CS4 is addition to AF41 for other video traffic. In the new versions of CallManager, there is a separate class for Telepresence in addition to Interactive video.

[samath.ith]

Thanks Justin and George for your input.

My main concern is that I manage Telepresence and there is another group that manages the IP telephones.

Currently I have my own cluster and is isolated from everyone else.

The IP telphony folks thought it would be a better idea if we could leverage the new UCS servers that the phones are on and just add my telepresence endpoints.

My main concern is that I have an older telepresence cluster with old software versions and  I am worried that if the telephony folks wanted to upgrade the call mangers to a newer version I might run into compatability issues with the rest of my telepresence equipment.

-Sam

[tunderhi]

Hi Sam

It really depends on how you want to play this.  You can keep the clusters separate and trunk between them or have your TelePresence endpoints register on the voice cluster.  Check the compatibility matrix for the CTS version(s) and CUCM version you're running

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps8332/products_device_support_tables_list.html

It sounds like it might give you more peace of mind to keep the clusters separate to ensure you don't have to worry about compatibility issues so much.

On the whole it's worth keeping your TelePresence versions as up to date as possible since new features are included in the new versions so if you're voice guys are upgrading their CUCM reguarly this is no bad thing for when you feel ready to collapse the two clusters into one in the future.

HTH

Trevyn

[Martin Koch]

One major thing to separate video from audio only is that phone users are intended to have

more stability vs. video/telepresence need more features / benefit stronger from upgrades

The phone service is more often defined as operation critical then it is video by today.

If you have two installations you can still have a very stable phone network and upgrade

as much as you want on the video part without disturbing that.

[Michael Boscia]

Standalone network, no.

There is no good reason to have a complete overlay network.

Separate CUCM cluster, yes.

The release schedule for TP and video is far more aggressive than voice, so having different clusters for both TP and voice is a good decision.

Having them on the same UCS would be fine as long as you are not breaking Cisco's UCS provisioning rules.

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