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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.
Site types
A network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager can work with several different types of sites. All IP ranges that have been configured for a site are maintained if you change the site's type.

Site types

A network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager can work with several different types of sites. All IP ranges that have been configured for a site are maintained if you change the site's type.

Sites provide an anchor for links in the topology model. However, there are distinct differences and uses for the three types of sites:

Regular sites
Use regular sites to model physical locations, such as buildings, campuses, or cities, in the enterprise network topology model.
- They are represented by the IP addresses or ranges of endpoints that are supported in them.
- They can have associated bandwidth pools and constraints.
Cloud sites
Use cloud sites to model intermediate connection points for multiple virtual circuits in the network topology model.
- They do not have any IP ranges associated with them.
- They cannot have any endpoints associated with them.
- They cannot have any bandwidth constraints associated with them.
VPN
Use VPN sites to model home and mobile user VPNs as users of the physical enterprise network in the topology model.
- Like regular sites, they are represented by the IP addresses or ranges of endpoints that are supported in them and they also have bandwidth constraints.
- They cannot have physical links with other sites.
- They can have virtual links to other sites only via the Internet site.

For examples of different site types, see the examples listed in Modeling your network topology.