Tenant Partitioning in Cisco Unity Connection 10.x

Overview of Tenant Partitioning

Beginning with Cisco Unity Connection 10.0(1) release, a concept of tenant partitioning has been introduced where administrator can configure multiple small medium businesses (SMBs) as tenants on a single Unity Connection server installation.

If Unity Connection server is being shared by N (N=2, 3, 4….) tenants for voicemail service, each tenant can be setup as a separate “tenant” that is effectively isolated from other tenant hosted on the same server. Hence, a tenant entity refers to logical group of resources in Unity Connection assigned to a single company, where each tenant is assigned with only one partition, search space, and phone system.

Tenant partitioning also introduces the concept of using the corporate email addresses as their alias, which enables alias uniqueness across tenants. In addition, separate Unity Connection SMTP domain is provided for each tenant.

Supported Tenant Partitioning Topology

Figure 7-1Sample Deployment scenario depicts the high level topology or deployment scenario that is being followed for tenant partitioning. Here, tenant 1 and tenant 2 have unique phone systems to identify inbound and outbound voicemail traffic. Each tenant has its own dedicated Cisco Unified Communication Manager.

Figure 7-1 Sample Deployment

 

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Here each tenant has its own partition, schedule set, schedule, schedule detail, search space, search space member, phone system, class of service, user template, distribution list, distribution list membership, user operator, call handler template, directory handler, interview handler, call handlers (operator, opening greeting, Good Bye), and routing rules.

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Noteblank.gif In Multi-tenancy mode, any configuration can be done using REST APIs. The configuration done using administrator pages is not supported.

Note: If you are upgrading Unity Connection 10.0(1) with Tenant Partitioning configured to a higher release then the Tenant Partitioning feature remains enabled on the upgraded system also.

Licensing

The tenant partitioning implementation does not require any additional licenses.

Scalability

Tenant Partitioning is a feature that offers a voice messaging solution for up to 60 tenants where each tenant can have maximum of 100 users on the Cisco Unity Connection 7vCPU OVA. For more information, see the “Specifications for Virtual Platform Overlays for Currently Shipping Connection 10.x Servers” section of the Cisco Unity Connection 10.x Supported Platforms List at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/10x/supported_platforms/10xcucspl.html#pgfId-703559.

Limitations of Tenant Partitioning

The following is the list of limitations of Tenant Partitioning:

  • Each tenant is associated with only one phone system and Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
  • Any other kind of networking like Diginet or VPIM is not supported.
  • There is no way to share ports between multiple tenants. Each tenant has dedicated pool of ports.
  • Overlapping extensions within a tenant is not supported.
  • Any configurations done at the system level is not supported.
  • At least one user in each tenant has to assign role of Greeting administrator so that tenant can customize their greetings.
  • Tenants have to provide users alias as corporate email address to maintain uniqueness of alias across tenants.
  • Single sign-on access feature using OpenAM in Cisco Unity Connection 9.1(2) and earlier releases are not supported with tenant partitioning.
  • SAML SSO (Security Assertion Markup Language Single Sign-On) access feature in Unity Connection 10.0(1) and later releases are not supported with tenant partitioning.
  • Multi-tenancy mode is not turned ON if there is any non-tenant user.
  • Each object of tenant (like call handlers, directory handlers) should be mapped to object related to that tenant only.
  • Custom keypad mappings are shared among all tenants.