Cisco Preferred Architecture for Enterprise Collaboration 10.x, CVD - April 2015

Introduction

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Revised: January 22, 2015

In recent years, many new collaborative tools have been introduced to the market, enabling businesses to enhance communications and extend collaboration outside the walls of their businesses. Organizations realize the added value that collaboration applications bring to their businesses through increased employee productivity and enhanced customer relationships. Significant advances have been made in the collaboration space to simplify deployment, improve interoperability, and enhance the overall user experience.

Today's collaboration solutions offer organizations the ability to integrate video, audio, and web participants into a single, unified meeting experience. The guidelines within this Cisco Validated Design (CVD) guide are written with the overall collaboration architecture in mind. Subsystems are used for better organization of the content, and the recommendations within them are tested to ensure they align with recommendations in related subsystems.

Architectural Overview

This CVD for the Enterprise Collaboration Preferred Architecture incorporates a subset of products from the total Cisco Collaboration portfolio that is best suited for the enterprise market segment. This Preferred Architecture deployment model is prescriptive, out-of-the-box, and built to scale with an organization as its business needs change. This prescriptive approach simplifies the integration of multiple system-level components while also enabling an organization to select the features, services, and capacities that best address its business needs.

This CVD for the Enterprise Collaboration Preferred Architecture provides end-to-end collaboration targeted for deployments larger than 1,000 users. For smaller deployments, consult the Preferred Architecture Design Overview and CVDs for Midmarket Collaboration.

This CVD for the Enterprise Collaboration Preferred Architecture provides high availability for critical applications. The architecture supports an advanced set of collaboration services that extend to mobile workers, partners, and customers through the following key services:

• Voice communications
• Instant messaging and presence
• High definition video and content sharing
• Rich media conferencing
• Enablement of mobile and remote workers
• Business-to-business voice and video communications
• Unified voice messaging

Because of the adaptable nature of Cisco endpoints and their support for IP networks, this architecture enables an organization to use its current data network to support both voice and video calls. In general, it is a best practice to deploy a collaboration solution with proper Quality of Service (QoS) configured throughout the network. Voice and video IP traffic should be classified and prioritized to preserve the user experience and avoid negative effects such as delay, loss, and jitter. For more information about LAN and WAN QoS, see the Cisco Collaboration SRND.

The Cisco Preferred Architecture for Enterprise Collaboration, shown in Figure 1-1, provides highly available and secure centralized services. These services extend easily to remote offices and mobile workers, providing availability of critical services even if communication with headquarters is lost. This should be viewed as a fundamental architecture from which to design a new deployment or to evolve an existing one. As the Preferred Architecture progresses, this architecture will be expanded upon with additional products and solutions.

Figure 1-1 Cisco Preferred Architecture for Enterprise Collaboration

Table 1-2 lists the products in this architecture. For simplicity, products are grouped into modules to help categorize and define their roles. The content of this CVD is organized into the same modules.

Network Services

The Preferred Architecture for Enterprise Collaboration requires a well-structured, highly available, and resilient network infrastructure as well as an integrated set of network services, including Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP), and Network Time Protocol (NTP). A detailed description of how these basic network services are utilized by Cisco applications and endpoints can be found in the Network Services section of the Cisco Collaboration SRND.

Virtualization

Virtualizing multiple applications and consolidating them on physical servers lowers cost, minimizes rack space, lowers power requirements, and simplifies deployment and management. Virtualization also accommodates redeploying hardware and scaling software applications as organizational needs change.

Collaboration Endpoints

The recommendations within this CVD guide assume a deployment of Cisco voice and video endpoints, including soft clients such as Cisco Jabber. These endpoints use SIP to register to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM). Table 1-3 lists the preferred endpoints for optimal features, functionality, and user experience.