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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.
Links to other sites
Links are defined as properties of the sites they connect. A link can be created, configured, or modified using the site configuration screen in either of the sites that it connects within the network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager.

Links to other sites

Links are defined as properties of the sites they connect. A link can be created, configured, or modified using the site configuration screen in either of the sites that it connects within the network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager.

The table at the end of the site configuration screen contains a row for each link that has been defined for that site. To add a new link to the site definition, click the New button in the Links table to open the link configuration screen.

The following user-defined properties of links are configured by providing values for the fields and controls on the link configuration screen.

Destination site name: This value is selected from a list that includes all sites that have been defined for this network.
Distance: By default, all links are given a distance of 10. By modifying this value, you can ensure that the call route represented in your network topology model matches the actual route for calls that routed through this link.
Link type: There are two types of links, physical and virtual. These are explained in the following section.

Additional properties of physical links:

Maximum bandwidth: Click the radio button for either Unlimited or Kbps. For Kbps, specify a value between 1-1,000,000 Kbps.
Peak utilization: This value determines when a bandwidth pool is considered to be highly utilized.