Presence Design Questions - Single AD Domain - Multiple IMP Clusters

[John Huthmaker]

I have a client who has international locations.  They are wanting to roll out a new CUCM enviornment with 3 clusters located regionally.  They have a single Active Directory domain.  They had two questions regarding IM & P.

1) Can they federate these clusters so all users can IM all users?  Keep in mind they only have one domain name.

2) Can they set up DNS so that no matter where a user is physically at, they are able to find their respective IMP servers?

[Jaime Valencia]

1 Yes, you can use inter-cluster between the IM&P servers

2 Yes, configure ILS in CUCM

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that you need to make sure to check the home cluster option only in ONE cluster, assuming they will all sync to the same OU

[JacobMunson]

I am working on a similar environment and have a follow up question about DNS. How should the internal _cisco-uds SRV record be configured? Does it matter what cluster it's pointed to? Can it be directed at a session manager that is the Hub of the ILS network even though there isn't an IMP server in the session manager cluster?

[Jaime Valencia]

No, it doesn't matter to which server you point the SRV.

Yes, you can point it to SME, the UDS record is for CUCM not IM&P

[JacobMunson]

Awesome thanks for the verification. 

[alexredko1]

What, if I don't want to deploy SME? Can I deploy ILS without SME?

[R0g22]

Yes you can. SME is used for centralized management. You need to have ILS running if you have a multi-cluster/multi-domain setup.

[alexredko1]

Thanx for a flash answer! I have several sites with several CUCM+IMP clusters under one domain. My main goal to deploy two clusters under one domain and users should have a possibility to register on both sites (don't care where users located). Did I understand correctly, that I should deploy several clusters with ILS (SME not needed) and configure inter-cluster between IMPs?