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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.
Example 1: Leased lines
Illustration of a leased-line network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager. This example shows how you can model the simplest possible type of network, consisting of only two locations connected through leased lines.

Example 1: Leased lines

Illustration of a leased-line network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager. This example shows how you can model the simplest possible type of network, consisting of only two locations connected through leased lines.

The following figure shows a simple network consisting of two locations connected through leased lines:

If you replace specific users and devices with sites and then connect the sites with links, the resulting network topology model looks like this:

At call setup time, the bandwidth manager figures out the route taken by the media through the modeled network topology, and allocates bandwidth as appropriate along the way. For example, for a call between an endpoint in Site A and an endpoint in Site B, different amounts of bandwidth can be allocated for Site A, for the link between the two sites, and for Site B. The amount of bandwidth allocated is determined by the settings configured for each of the sites and the link connecting them.