ok, here is a dumb question Im sure, but how do I go about deciding which to use, hardware or software conference bridges? I have both in place, but not sure which to use. Thats a very good point you bring up, any advice you might have will be appreciated.

Also, Id like to ask, how do you know which one is actually being used if both are configured?

most usually you will use a NM with PVDM2 which allow N conferences based on codec complexity but all of those N conferences with up to 8 participants.

the bright side is that it allows multi-codec conference, downside is number of participants for some deployments

SW CFB supports up to 128 per CFB. So 2 servers mean 128 x 2 users. we recommend not going over 42 participants when configuring the service parameters.

bright side is the number of participants goes up, but only G711 and wideband codecs accepted, multi-codec requires a separate SCODER.

so, the questions are: how many users you will need??

how many conferences at the same time?

is this going to be 1 time only or you'll have conference with +8 users??

based on that you can define whether it's best to configure SW or HW.

ie: a guy makes conferences every week but with internal guys, use SW CFB under MRGL

another guy calls people on other sites which uses G729 and GSM networks, use HW CFB.

there really are no thumb rules, it really depends on what usage you're going to give to the CFBs to define how to allocate them.

always remember: media resources as close as possible to users that will use them

EDIT: usage is determined via MRGL (ordered MRG there go top down), resources in the same MRG are used in a round robin fashion to share the load so best practice is to have a MRG with SW and other MRG with HW. otherwise you cannot tell which one you'll end up using

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

Awesome info. Thanks!