Cisco Collaboration Design Question

[Laith Ibrahim]

Hello Everyone,

I have a design question for cisco collaboration, my case is as follows:

My customer has the below branches details:

HO (100 users)

B1 (600 Users)

B2 (500 Users)

B3 (400 Users)

The customer can't go with all branches at one shot, so he is planning to implement the telephony in phases,

Of course, this will make my job harder to do to plan for the future and at the same time save some money in the budget,

Phase 1: HO Only

Phase 2: B1

Phase 3: B2 & B3

The application planned to setup is:

CUCM

CUC

CUPS

Expressway-E (not for all users)

Expressway-C (not for all users)

Now I have a couple of questions:

1) Can we start with a small setup and then go big? like with BE6K and then expand the setup with bigger servers?

2) In this scenario what is the best, Centralized or Distributed setup?

3) Is SRST recommended for a branch with 400-600 users? or is it better to have a server there?

4) Any other thoughts from you guys is really appreciated.

Thanks for the help,

[TONY SMITH]

"1) Can we start with a small setup and then go big? like with BE6K and then expand the setup with bigger servers?"

Not without some extra work.  BE6K doesn't support this many users, and although I believe the licences can be transferred you would have to build your new VMs from scratch, and restore the configuration from backup.  

"Is SRST recommended for a branch with 400-600 users? or is it better to have a server there?"

In my opinion that's getting a bit big for SRST.  Whether or not you want to locate CUCM subscribers at these sites depends on how reliable your WAN is.  I have known customers with big sites who didn't implement any form of local voice fallback, in these cases their WAN was reliable and also they were highly dependent on the corporate WAN for other services.

One factor may be how you're going to run your external phone lines.  SRST is pointless for many sites if they don't have their own local telephone service, and nowadays many organisations are consolidating these into centralised high availability SIP trunks.

[Jaime Valencia]

Please get a reputable consultant or a local Cisco Partner WITH voice specializations to assist or do the design, to ensure that it meets the customer requirements and doesn't require a (usually costly) re-design in the future.

[bstudebaker]

1. I wouldn't, you can but that would be a lot of work and more money spent in the long run, build out your design to support what you have today and any projected growth in the future.

2. Depends how far away your branches are from each other and where you would put a centralized solution (at one of the branches or in a DC). From a management stand point I would centralize it if you can, CUCM servers cant be farther than 80ms apart for database replication to work good.

3. 400-600 SRST is huge, I'm not sure if any router can support that many phones, if you place a subscriber at the branches that's more infrastructure you will have to buy and maintain, best bet is to add redundant circuits that have diverse paths for all the branch offices, and then implement SD-WAN so your voice traffic will always take the best available path. Are you implementing SIP trucks, PRI's?...POTS lines? that would also affect the design....In my opinion Centralized SIP is the way to go, but again it depends on where your branch locations are located and how far apart they are, and if you are planning on utilizing one of the branches for your infrastructure or a DC.

4. I have implemented CUCM at 2 different companies over the last 8 years, the first company I had SIP trunks go into ever branch office and CUCM at out HQ with a Subscribers at one of our other branch offices, I learned a lot from this deployment, distributed SIP trunks at all locations was a lot to manage, CUBE routers to keep updated, routing changes to keep track of...ect..

The Company I am at now I have centralized SIP trunks down at 2 DC's in Las Vegas, with CUCM split between the 2 DC's as well, all the Branch offices (a little less than 200 sites and growing every year) have redundant circuits with SD-WAN.....its been working great for the most part.

[Nithin Eluvathingal]

Clustering through Wan using Be7k  will be an option where you keep a publisher subscriber in HQ and one subscriber each in branches. Again its just an option. You need to consider lot of things when designing a solution and you cannot one  based on some reply in community. its highly recommended to involve some one who is good in collaboration.

Partner support will help you to  building a BOQ

If you are T1 partner you an seek partner support directly. if T2, your Disti help you to  build a solution or they can open a partner support ticket.

Additionally Go through SRND and  CVD document from below link.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/srnd/collab12/collab12.html

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/solutions/CVD/Collaboration/enterprise/12x/120/collbcvd/conferencing.html