TMS - MCU selection

[j-ackermann]

Hi,

if more than one MCU is registered to a tms and marked availiable for bookoings, is there a way to assign a preference, which MCU is used first?

How does TMS decide which one to use?

Thx,

     Jochen

[Jens Didriksen]

You can specify the preferred MCU under

Administrative Tools/Configuration/Conference Settings:

Advanced Conference Options: Preferred MCU Type in Routing

The MCU selected when scheduling a conference will also depend on bandwidth capabilities, availabiltiy of resources etc, i.e. if you have one SD MCU and one HD MCU, and the conference b/w is set to 4Mbps, then TMS will select the HD MCU regarless of the SD MCU being set as the preferred MCU.

I strongly recommend taking a look at Conductor if you have more than one MCU, as this will do the MCU resource management for you, far better than TMS can on its own. (Your MCUs must be supported by Conductor though.)

See http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11775/index.html

/jens

[Richard Mitchell]

Jens,

Can you shed some light on how MCU selection would take place in a very large GLOBAL MPLS network. For example where customer has multiple MCU's divided by regions being managed by a single TMS instance. How would TMS or possibly Conductor know which MCU to choose when booking to provide best rMCU selection and outing accross the various regions?

The customer project we are working on is working to automate this through TMS API booking so the suggestion below of dividing the MCU's into folders and assigning user permissions might not work as needed.

Aprreciate your thoughts.

Richard

[Greg Roberts]

In addtion to Jens' comments, another apporach is to create folders for different user groups and copy particular MCU(s) into the same folders in TMS.  Using the Permission process in TMS, you can specify which folder(s) that particular user(s) can access during the Booking/scheduling process, thus limiting whcih MCU(s) are available to particular user groups and video systems.

Different approach, but I thought it might be helpful.