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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 Media Manager services
This topic provides an overview of peer-to-peer and n-way voice and video communication in IBM® Sametime®. It describes the Sametime servers and server components, and third party components, used in voice and video.
Audio and video deployment scenarios
This topic surveys the IBM® Sametime® voice and video deployment scenarios available based on your environment and resources. This topic can help you decide which deployment is right for you.
Geographically distributed Video MCU Servers
The IBM® Sametime® Geographically Distributed Video MCU feature allows you to install Sametime Video MCU servers or a Video MCU cluster across different geographies. Each Video MCU server or Video MCU cluster is responsible for hosting the conference originating from that particular geography. Each geography is referred to as a site. A site typically corresponds to a local area network configured for a geographical location, for example, an office or manufacturing plant.

Geographically distributed Video MCU Servers

The IBM® Sametime® Geographically Distributed Video MCU feature allows you to install Sametime Video MCU servers or a Video MCU cluster across different geographies. Each Video MCU server or Video MCU cluster is responsible for hosting the conference originating from that particular geography. Each geography is referred to as a site. A site typically corresponds to a local area network configured for a geographical location, for example, an office or manufacturing plant.

A typical use case for Geographically Distributed Video MCU is an organization with offices across several geographies, for example, an organization with one office each in the USA, UK and Asia. You can create a separate site for each office in the USA, UK and Asia and install a Video MCU server, or Video MCU cluster based on required capacity, for managing these sites. For more information about sites, see Adding Sametime Video Manager Server sites.

Geographically Distributed Video MCU provides scalability and helps conserve bandwidth.

Design the topology by dividing different locations of an organization into sites. A site can include more than one location based on the locations' geographical proximity. For example, two offices in the UK can be configured as a single site. Install one or more Video MCU servers based on capacity planning.