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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 2: Clouds
Illustration of a cloud-based network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager. This example shows how you can model a network containing sites that are connected through any-to-any clouds, rather than dedicated links.

Example 2: Clouds

Illustration of a cloud-based network managed by IBM® Sametime® Bandwidth Manager. This example shows how you can model a network containing sites that are connected through any-to-any clouds, rather than dedicated links.

Cloud sites offer the following advantages:

Coupled with the Distance metric, you can see the actual routes that calls take when there are multiple route possibilities.
They provide an anchor for describing virtual links if physical link sharing is used at your site.

Many common scenarios involve multiple sites that are connected through any-to-any clouds (for instance, MPLS networks). The following figure shows a scenario where 3 sites are connected through a common MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network:

Network diagram with any-to-any cloud

Each of the sites is represented in the topology model and is defined by a set of IP ranges. In addition, the MPLS cloud is introduced as a separate network in the topology. The WAN access links in each site are modeled as links between that site and the shared cloud. The resulting topology model looks as follows:

Topology model with any-to-any cloud

Note: Clouds differ from sites in the following three ways:

They do not have any IP ranges associated with them.
As a result, they cannot have any endpoints associated with them.
They do not have any bandwidth constraints associated with them.