Home
Planning
Planning is critical to a successful deployment. Many deployment problems, growth problems, and capacity problems occur because not enough time is taken to carefully plan a deployment. Plan your IBM® Sametime® installation by determining features needed, reviewing system requirements, determining capacity requirements, and the servers and computers needed for your deployment.
Planning Sametime® features
This section describes best practices, requirements, tips, and things you should know when planning for instant messaging and presence services, meeting services, web client services, audio and video services, broadcast communities and persistent chat rooms, including IBM® Sametime® services in the extranet for remote users and customers. Included in this section are several sample topologies, everything from simple internal meetings to voice and video for intranet and extranet users.
Planning for Sametime® Bandwidth Manager services
The IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager works with the Sametime Media Manager, controlling bandwidth used in audio and video calls that are handled by the Media Manager.
Modeling your network topology
The first step towards configuring IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager is to model your network topology. By understanding your network, and the locations that are connected on the network, you can identify the bandwidth bottlenecks where bandwidth constraints are wanted. In this way, you can plan the sites and links that will enable you to place constraints on bandwidth use.
IP ranges
IP ranges are used to define sites in IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager. The sites are then configured with bandwidth constraints, which are applied to calls involving users with corresponding IP addresses.

IP ranges

IP ranges are used to define sites in IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager. The sites are then configured with bandwidth constraints, which are applied to calls involving users with corresponding IP addresses.

Users are automatically assigned to the appropriate site based on their IP address, as follows:

Administrators associate a list of IP subnet address ranges with each standard site.
If no matching site is found for the endpoint's IP address, it is assigned to the default site.
The default site cannot be deleted, thus every endpoint will be assigned to a site.
Cloud sites are used to model networking clouds, and are intended for routing purposes only. No IP addresses can be configured for cloud sites.

Specifying IP ranges

There are three ways to specify an IP range value. They are:

Adding a single IP address, such as 192.168.0.1.
Adding a range by specifying a starting IP address and ending IP address separated by a hyphen, as in 192.168.0.2-192.168.0.10.
Adding a range by specifying an entry such as 192.168.0.1/N, where N is the number of bits that identify the network. This notation is referred to as CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing).