System information

Deployment Guide for Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape Environments
22
Use Cases for Resilient Video Conferencing
The following section explains use cases for resilient video conferencing.
Centralized Conference Resource Management
You require a centralized conference resource management application to create a pool of conference
servers that behave as one large conference server. This management application server tracks the
incoming calls and routes them to the appropriate resource, for instance, based on available server
resources or on available bandwidth to the location of this server.
If the virtual meeting room (VMR) is using a template that has cascading enabled, the application server
automatically creates cascading links. The DMA system must have site topology data. For more
information, refer to the Polycom DMA system documentation at
support.polycom.com.
Cascading a video conference across multiple MCUs can conserve bandwidth and is especially useful
when using wide area network (WAN) links. Specifically, participants can connect to MCUs that are
geographically near, reducing network traffic between sites to a single link to each MCU. Cascading
does, however, impact the quality of the conference experience.
Note: Cascading is Supported for RMX MCUs in H.323
Cascading is supported only for RMX MCUs and only in H.323. The Polycom DMA system must be
configured to support H.323 signaling in order to enable cascading. For conferences with
cascading enabled, the system selects only RMX MCUs that have H.323 signaling enabled.
The management application provides uninterrupted service by routing calls around failed or busy
media servers. It also allows media servers to have a busyout status during maintenance activities. From
the user’s point of view, the service is always available. The system can gradually grow from small
deployments of one-to-two media servers to large deployments with many geographically dispersed
media servers. System administrators can monitor daily usage and plan the expansion as necessary.
This approach also provides a centralized mechanism to deploy a front-end application to control and
monitor conferencing activities across all media servers. The management application acts as a load
balancer in this scenario, that is, it can distribute the load over a group of conference servers. The larger
the resource pool, the more efficient the load balancing function, a feature that is critical to large
organizations with offices and conference servers around the world.
The same technology can be used by service providers who offer conference services globally by using
the Polycom DMA 7000 solution and deploying conference servers in central points of the network. The
scenario works well in architectures such as SIP, in which the registrar function is separate from the
proxy function, that is, where the endpoint is registered with a SIP registrar in the network but sends its
calls to a pool of SIP Proxies.