Which Box Should Be Publisher and Which Should Be Subscriber?

[rneil]

An admittedly basic question, but one which I have gotten conflicting feedback on:

We want to set up a two-CM cluster using an MCS-7822 and an MCS-7825. The 7825 has significantly more horsepower than the 7822, so would it best be used as the publisher or as the subscriber?

Thanks,

robert

[gary.shaw]

What version of CM do you plan using, the 7822 is pretty old now and I dont think its capable of running any of the new versions. Is this for a lab your creating or a customer rollout?

[a.wells]

these are only my thoughts.

It would depend on the scenario how many phones gateways cti route points MOH etc, the 7825

would support more devices.

Though I would be inclined to use this(7825) as the primary

subscriber it will do call processing.You could let the other box provide software conference bridge and moh useing device pools.

put as much ram in the 7822 as possible I think the 7822 shipped wit 512 I would suggest at least 1gig as the MCS software has changed somewhat since the release of that server. assuming your running recent software release with the extra features and fixes.

Once you have your cluster up and phones are registered with the subscriber 7825 stop the callmanager service on 7825 while running task manager and perf mon on the PUB look at counter registerd phones from both servers in the 1 window

and watch the phones failover to the publisher.This should be done after hours.

In the future you might want to look at buying a mcs 7835 ,compaq dl380 or IBM x342 3ru you will then run raid 1 and have redundant drives the option is there for a dat drive as well.

Many types of devices can register with a Cisco CallManager. Each of these resources—IP phones, voice mail ports, Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI) devices, Java Telephony API (JTAPI) devices, gateways, and DSP resources such as transcoding and conferencing—carries a different weight.

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/ip_tele/network/dgclustr.htm#xtocid103062

There is heaps of doco about clusters online

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/ip_tele/network/dgintro.htm

[rneil]

Thanks for the feedback.

My thoughts were the same - that is make the 7822 the publisher and the 7825 the primary subscriber since the office is very small (20 users) and the database will be reasonably static. However, the customer says that his Cisco rep recommended the opposite. I'm trying to follow up to see what Cisco's rationale is and just wanted to get some others' thoughts on it.

It is currently a live network with everything running off of the 7822. I am just debating how to incorporate the 7825. It does, indeed have 512MB and is running 3.1(3a).

[mimckee]

Both scenarios make sense to me. To me I think it makes sense to make the 7825 the pub and the 7822 the sub. The reason is that the I assume the pub will be the main database server and the backup callmanager and the sub will just but the primary callmanager. Keep in mind it is much easier to just add the 7825 as a sub and to make the 7825 the pub and make the 7822 the sub. You would have to backup the 7822 build the 7825 with same name on different network or with 7822 powered down then restore the data from 22 to the 25. So if everything is working fine now on just the 1 7822 not sure it it will really be worth it.

my $.02

-Mckee

[rneil]

Thanks, Mike, for the feedback...

I gather from your reply that the function of database server requires more resources than does that of call management. Is it always true then, that the publisher should be the biggest, baddest box in the cluster?

[mimckee]

I think that would be a fait assessment. The other point I was trying to make was that in your scenairo the pub will also be a backup call processor so that will be double duty for him. And the sub will just have to do call processing. The sub has minimal database responsibilties.

Hope this helps,

-Mckee