- Cisco Networking: TelePresence

A practical deployment guide

-Introduction

This article describes a typical Cisco TelePresence deployment and its related services from a practical standpoint. Cisco TelePresence is a high-definition conferencing environment, designed for virtualizing meetings from units set up anywhere in the world, and requiring only a standard TCP/IP-enabled network infrastructure. Cisco TelePresence allows new forms of collaboration and human interconnection, in which employees can connect easily and instantly with coworkers, customers, partners and so on anywhere in the world without leaving the office. From a practical perspective, Cisco TelePresence is a solution that brings people together at the same table, in the same office, despite the usual barriers such as time of day and distance. It is one of the flagship products of Cisco's vision of Unified Communications, converging voice, video and data over the same well-known IP network infrastructure.

Cisco TelePresence for partners and Cisco TelePresence Services

With its unique methodology and design, the Cisco TelePresence solution exists in a world of its own, which therefore calls for a special approach to its deployment, brought to end companies by Cisco or Cisco Authorized Technology Provider (ATP) partners.

As with any complex technology that offers simplicity to the end user, in a Cisco-enabled TelePresence virtual collaboration, the solution hides the usually overwhelming (and, in most cases, utterly unimportant) background technology details behind the scenes of what the TelePresence “experience.” This is done by incorporating this technology in the industry’s well-known and widely accepted Cisco Lifecycle Services, in which the TelePresence solution has a corner of its own, ultimately falling under the Unified Communications vision of all-around managed services.

Figure 1:

Cisco Lifecycle Services

Focusing our discussion on service providers and Cisco ATP partners, which will be involved in Cisco TelePresence deployments internally, or for their respective customers, this article will continue through the Lifecycle Services mentioned earlier, giving advice and commenting on every necessary step and procedure for successful TelePresence deployment. A few goals are set in advance – customer or management satisfaction, effectiveness, timeliness, and bringing Cisco TelePresence to the face of the end user (for overall amazement).

We will bring these topics into focus from the point of view of the Cisco Certified Voice Professional (CCVP), and therefore we will stay on the engineering side of the Cisco TelePresence deployment.

Although Cisco defines TelePresence as part of the Lifecycle Services, one small difference sets this solution apart from the others: going one step further, Cisco defined another set of enhanced service offerings, named “Cisco TelePresence Services.” Cisco TelePresence Services encompasses these offerings:

Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service

Cisco TelePresence Essential Operate Service

Cisco TelePresence Remote Management Service

Cisco TelePresence Select Operate Service

Cisco TelePresence Remote Assistance Service

Cisco TelePresence Expert Access Service (only for the CTS 500 system)

No matter which of these services you offer as a Cisco TelePresence technology provider, you will have to master the details of bringing the immersive experience to your customers and end users.

Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service

As its name unmistakably declares, the Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service is concerned with the preparation, design and implementation of the Lifecycle Services framework, originally composed of the PPDIOO (Prepare, Plan, Design, Implement, Operate and Optimize) phases.

Note:

Depending on the number of sites on which the solution will be installed, you should be able to complete a multipoint Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service for a customer with three sites located no more than 1,000 miles apart in a time window of approximately 16 to 20 weeks.

Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service subdivides further into project milestones or services such as deliverables that you must present to the customer, in cooperation and timely agreement with the Cisco Project Manager (Cisco PM) and Customer Project Manager (Customer PM). In practice, these milestones or services consist of the following:

Project management

Customer Requirements Validation

TelePresence Facilities Qualification Assessment

TelePresence Network Path Qualification

Detailed Design Document development

Network Implementation Plan development and execution

Solution and site acceptance test plan development and execution (or Network Ready For Use [NRFU] document)

Conducting the site survey

Furniture and hardware installation

Administrator and end-user training

Project Management

Project management is conducted and under control of the Project Manager. The PM will be your designated single point of contact for all issues throughout the project cycle.

Note:

Build and maintain an excellent contact with your PM, as this person is responsible for the project schedule, along with certain background details that need to be covered and/or explained to the Customer PM.

For every issue that seems problematic or irresolvable, turn to your PM. Be prepared to explain technical or other details and to develop custom questionnaires and technical documents that the PM will later forward to your customer. In all these questionnaires or interim documents and correspondence that are not part of the official services cycle, be precise and very straightforward. Ask engineering questions, numbered and bulleted, with spaces indicating the expected answers. In 90% of all cases, the customer does not know anything about the technology you are using. Stress the final product of your efforts and be exact in explaining your engineering goals, which will be easily achievable if you have the necessary information.

Another important issue is just “being there” for your PM. As you will be delivering a complex solution (the Cisco TelePresence), you will have to cooperate with and update the PM on all matters. This may mean starting conferencing sessions a bit earlier than scheduled, with only your PM on the line, and adding the Customer PM and customer engineers later. This approach builds confidence, ensures preparedness, and eases decision-making and answering questions later, when the Customer PM joins the conversation. No matter what topic is discussed, you will update all information with your PM and present yourselves as a winning team, ready to answer any question.

Your readiness and engineering knowledge will inevitably be tested with the first meeting – the project kickoff. Officially the “milestone definer,” the project kickoff meeting is your first direct contact with the people for whom you will be installing the Cisco TelePresence solution. First impressions count, so be ready to interact with the customer’s senior networking engineers. Expect to be asked everything from the normal (“What impact will the TelePresence solution have on my network bandwidth?”) to the unusual (“Who will unload the lorries with the equipment?”).

In the project kickoff meeting, you will have the chance to show off all your technical and engineering knowledge of the Cisco TelePresence solution and to connect it with much broader topics, such as security, routing and switching, and end-user or administration training. In this meeting you will be expected to answer questions precisely and correctly, so be swift and focused with your answers and explanations. Take your time with issues that warrant extra discussion, but keep the room’s interest at a desirable level.

Customer Requirements Validation

The next step in the Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service is the Customer Requirements Validation. This is the turning point of this phase, which inevitably differentiates between successful and less successful (or unsuccessful) project completions.

In this phase, you will gather customer-supplied documentation and/or conduct interviews with designated customer representatives, with the goal of learning essential features/functionality, as well as requirements for immersive conferencing experiences that pertain to the TelePresence solution. This means putting together the Detailed Design Document up front – knowing its main building points, and filling the document structure with the proper information that you will obtain through the Customer Requirements Validation. Directly connected with the Detailed Design Document, the Customer Requirements Validation builds from the recommendations for TelePresence network design and best practices of former TelePresence projects.

At minimum, you will need to obtain details from the customer about the following systems and documents:

LAN/WAN network architecture details

Network infrastructure connectivity

Call Manager design

Call Admission Control

Dial plan requirements

Redundancy

Directory access and integration

QoS details

Service capabilities and SLA

You need the LAN/WAN infrastructure details for a proper design of the TelePresence Quality of Service (QoS) traffic requirements, router and switch processing power, and connectivity details. Finding out the type of LAN/WAN devices and their interconnectivity will also define the planned redundancy in the core network, for the TelePresence solution and all servers. In practice, these steps depend heavily on whether the WAN network is owned by the customer or you are interconnecting the TelePresence endpoints through a service provider’s leased service. In the latter case, obtaining a proper service-level agreement (SLA) and service capabilities is of the outmost importance.

As part of the Unified Communications portfolio, the Cisco TelePresence solution is an endpoint that registers with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Call Manager, which functions as a back-to-back user agent between the TelePresence endpoints. It’s crucial to know your customer’s Call Manager implementation and design (such as the cluster where you will add the TelePresence endpoints), version, licensing requirements, and the Call Admission Control implementation.

Here’s a simple example to show how important it is that you have all of this background information. Suppose the Call Manager’s regions construct for enforcing Call Admission Control is set at the same value used to define Cisco Unified IP Phones. This would certainly lead to erratic behavior when you add the TelePresence endpoints to these predefined locations. The same cautious approach should be used when implementing the endpoint numbering and partition/calling search space details. Putting the TelePresence endpoints in partitions and assigning calling search spaces not privileged enough to reach these partitions could lead to absence of connectivity – for one of the most awkward reasons possible. Similar problems could emerge if the customer’s directory access and integration solution is not taken into account. Always remember to follow the compatibility matrices information, detailing versions and compatibility between third-party products and the Cisco TelePresence solution.

Armed with this priceless knowledge, you will be ready to integrate the TelePresence solution with the customer’s existing Unified Communications endpoints.

Note:

In case many IP phones are already deployed, a general rule is to devise a strategy of adding a new Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster, designed in 1:1 or 2:1 redundancy, for the new TelePresence endpoints. This new cluster will interconnect with the existing one through an intercluster trunk.

Facilities Qualification Assessment

Assessing the facilities to determine whether they’re qualified for TelePresence could easily be your first personal contact with the customer. This step of the Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service might spotlight your practical knowledge and experience from past projects.

As part of the assessment, verify that the customer’s specified facility locations conform to Cisco requirements. Note all of the following:

Physical room dimensions

Door locations

Lighting

Windows position

AC power

Room acoustic characteristics

Network infrastructure connectivity

Be prepared to look at architectural blueprints, discuss possible solutions with architects or construction engineers, and try to be influential in the decision-making process. With regard to the room’s physical dimensions and properties, take a stand and be prepared to defend it with arguments and reasons. In many situations, an inadequate solution for TelePresence rooms will be given as the only possible solution.

Note:

Your responsibility is an installation in appropriate accommodations, without undesirable conditions such as noise, echo, outdoor sunlight, or unbearable room temperature at half an hour into the meeting.

Changing the arrangements is easier at this early stage of the project than at any later point, and your practical suggestions probably will be welcomed. Keep an open mind and collaborate with site architects. Often, it is possible to turn a dead-end option into a “by the book” solution just by applying a few touches or rotating a TelePresence endpoint. Adhering strictly to Cisco-specified requirements also may be too rigid a stance. You have to try to satisfy both sides, remembering that the Cisco TelePresence conference rooms are part of and also identify the corporate environment.

Note:

Allow the customer to make changes in the room, as long as acoustics, lighting, power, and network requirements are not affected.

Present all the different ranges and possibilities that Cisco supports for color and room design. Many of these options were extracted from real-life corporate environments. By working together, you will eventually find room patterns that satisfy TelePresence engineering needs as well as the customer’s taste in décor.

Throughout all these efforts, stress continuity of the TelePresence endpoint rooms. Room remediation is a prerequisite only for the Cisco TelePresence 3000 and 3200 systems, but that does not mean that you can just deploy the Cisco TelePresence 500, 1000, and 1300 systems wherever you like.

Note:

As a practical rule, the more you follow the prerequisites and requirements, the less risk is involved for implementing the Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service.

Figure 2:

Cisco TelePresence 500

Figure 3:

Cisco TelePresence 1000

Figure 4:

Cisco TelePresence 1300

Figure 5:

Cisco TelePresence 3000

Figure 6:

Cisco TelePresence 3200

TelePresence Network Path Qualification

The TelePresence Network Path Qualification identifies appropriate network paths between TelePresence site pairs and performs analysis on the site-to-site link to determine its compliance with requirements to support video, audio and signaling traffic, based on Cisco Unified Communications TelePresence network design requirements. Your engineering knowledge is put to the test in this step, as routing and switching, MPLS and MPLS VPNs are the most widely used high-speed WAN connections today. Especially important, but often set aside or not taken into account, are the quality of service (QoS) requirements for real-time video traffic such as the TelePresence.

At this point, you will be able to limit the number of possible paths traversing the network and carrying TelePresence traffic, simply by stating and discussing TelePresence network requirements for your respective departments or customers. In more than 90% of all cases, WAN department engineers know the paths that conform to network requirements by heart. For us, this differentiation is just the beginning of the TelePresence Network Path Qualification process.

If your customer or internal WAN network connectivity department defines the candidate paths, it is still up to you to perform the site-to-site data-link path capture, which must include the following:

bandwidth

delay

jitter

packet loss

Note:

Earlier, flexibility toward the customer could be respected and even be a virtue. The opposite is true during the TelePresence Facilities Qualification Assessment; you must strictly follow best practices and requirements.

If some of the equipment along the proposed TelePresence traffic network path does not fall within the recommended limits, escalate an immediate issue with your PM and Customer PM. All measurements need to be completed during a longer period or, for practical reasons, a valid time of approximately one week. Take special care when analyzing this data, watching for busy hour call attempts, network load and the parameters of bandwidth, delay, jitter and packet loss stated above.

Performance load-testing on the site-to-site links should be conducted using Cisco and/or third-party tools. Our recommendation is to use the Video SLA Assessment Agent (VSAA) tool that measures service-level agreement (SLA) metrics on network paths. This application utilizes actual TelePresence traffic profiles, making it faster and more efficient to collect network SLA metrics for your reports. Another possibility is to use routers and IP SLA commands embedded in the Cisco IOS. Yet another option is to take customer-provided or department-provided data, from internally deployed network monitoring and management systems.

We can easily argue at this point that all these options work only if the customer or department owns the WAN network. If service is leased from a service provider, a well-defined and precise SLA will have to be in place for successful completion of the TelePresence Network Path Qualification. Service-level agreements are burdened with legal vocabulary and items defining contract signers’ rights and privileges. In practice, you must rise above legal issues and see the real background of the SLA, extracting what is most important – the actual values and numbers for the TelePresence network quality attributes.

Detailed Design Document Development

The final result of all your previously described efforts comes in the shape of a Detailed Design Document (DDD). In this stage, the TelePresence certified engineer reviews all previously compiled documents and requirements.

The DDD is the crown jewel of all your work up to this moment. In most cases, building the DDD is a demanding activity. Do not skip through this document, thinking that some topics are very well known and you can put that information to good use at the time of implementation. Someone other than you might be setting up the system, or details you know now may slip from your mind at implementation. The Detailed Design Document is your only reference during the implementation stage at the customer’s premises. If you cannot rely on the information it contains, or the DDD lacks detail, the implementation will take longer – or may even fail.

The Detailed Design Document should include at least the following information:

IP addressing

LAN/WAN configuration to accommodate TelePresence video, audio and signaling traffic

QoS configuration with policing for LAN/WAN

Network services such as DHCP, DNS, TFTP or NAT that relate to the TelePresence solution

Power, network and physical environment requirements

Service provider integration

The Detailed Design Document must state in detail the architectural scope of the solution you will be implementing, define the current deployment plan, draw the current network topology with Cisco and third-party equipment to be deployed, and even design the solution to allow for future expansion of the original configuration, such as adding interoperability with other conferencing systems.

The Detailed Design Document will also encompass the Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch and Cisco TelePresence Manager deployment and design details. For the Cisco Unified Communications Manager, you will define server designation, services, groups, time zone configuration, regions, locations, device pools, dial plan and TelePresence endpoint configuration with the user interface – the Cisco Unified 7975G IP Phone. Best practice is to equip these subheadings with snapshots and figure materials for better understanding and familiarity.

Figure 7:

Cisco Unified 7970G IP Phone

Special considerations are necessary when defining the Cisco TelePresence Manager configuration and details. As this is the only interface to a third party product – a Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino Server – it is very important for the integration to be defined clearly and precisely, with all configuration steps on both sides.

Note:

You will be expected to work closely with the directory administrator when defining the details of the room service accounts, AD integration and scheduling interfaces that end users will use when setting up new conferencing sessions.

This is the part of the Detailed Design Document where you can expect problems in practice, as it depends on more than just your skills. That is why you have to be prepared to define the integration in the Detailed Design Document, and request this information to be reviewed (and corrected, if necessary) by the directory administrator.

Network Implementation Plan Development

Having the proper information in the Detailed Design Document in your hands is invaluable and represents your starting point at the next step of the Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design and Implementation Service – the Network Implementation Plan (NIP) development.

The Network Implementation Plan details the information required to perform implementation of TelePresence network equipment, software and application configuration at end-customer sites. You have to write this document as a guide for engineers to assemble, install and configure the solution. These engineers must have experience with installation, configuration and troubleshooting of the products covered. Be careful writing this document, as you will have to gather information on site-specific contacts, locations, special considerations and installation requirements, as well as site-specific information from the Bill of Materials (BOM) and logistics for delivery of equipment for installation. Many of these tasks should be scheduled and completed before the physical assembly of the TelePresence endpoints.

Figure 8:

Network Implementation Plan Workflow Chart

The main focus of the Network Implementation Plan development is a workflow chart highlighting the planning and implementation flow that you will follow with the customer during the implementation. This is a typical phased approach with all dependencies noted and addressed. This step requires a plethora of additional documents:

Detailed Design Document

Site Survey Checklist

Cisco TelePresence Tool List

Cisco TelePresence System Administrator’s Guide

Troubleshooting the Cisco TelePresence System

Cisco TelePresence Manager Installation Guide

Cisco Unified Communications Manager Installation Guide for the Cisco TelePresence System

Cisco TelePresence 3000/1000/1300/500 Assembly, Use & Care and Field Replacement Unit Guide

Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch Administration Guide

Solution and Site Acceptance Test Plan

The Solution and Site Acceptance Test Plan that you compile in this step will be used subsequent to implementation to verify that the Unified Communications TelePresence system as implemented meets customer solution and site requirements as well as the requirements defined and developed in the Detailed Design Document, and that each site and the entire solution are certified as ready for the production environment.

The Solution and Site Acceptance Test Plan development actually consists of a few sets of tests carried out in two distinctive phases:

System verification

Room verification

The system verification phase is further broken down into call scheduling, call handling and call duration; the room verification is broken down into sound/acoustics and HDTV verification.

Note:

As these tests are completed before the Customer PM and your PM, it is very important to conduct and prepare for them at least one day in advance.

The expected duration of the TelePresence system tests is one working day.

Conduct Site Survey

Before the hardware implementation, the Conduct Site Survey step’s purpose is to survey and document each location where physical equipment will be installed as part of the proposed solution.

The site survey focuses on requirements for the following:

Space

Cabling

Conduits

Racks

Patch panels

Power

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning

This Conduct Site Survey step is directly connected with all possible logistics that you need to know before a successful implementation.

Furniture and Hardware Installation

After preparing for the implementation with all the information you gathered in the Conduct Site Survey step, you are ready to install the furniture and hardware.

Note:

A practical rule is to allow up to five working days for Cisco TelePresence 3000 and Cisco TelePresence 3200 endpoints, and up to three days for Cisco TelePresence 1300, 1000 or 500 endpoints.

The furniture and hardware installation for the endpoint is more handyman work than actual engineering.

Figure 9:

Furniture and hardware installation in progress

This physical part of the implementation requires good fitness and a practical approach to putting the equipment together in a timely fashion. Be ready to solve problems of moving objects into and out of elevators and leveling easily and quickly. Keep in mind that Cisco TelePresence equipment is heavy and assembly is demanding, especially for the plasma displays. Engineers will need special tools, protective knee pads, and tool belts for successful furniture and hardware installation.

Administration and End-User Training

The final step, training the administrator and end users, provides end-customer system administrators with knowledge about administration and usage of the TelePresence solution. Prepare the presentation with no more than 60 to 70 slides covering all aspects of the TelePresence system. Knowledge-transfer training takes place at the main location, where the TelePresence Manager server resides, and is expected to require no longer than 2–3 hours.

Note:

Stay relaxed during this session, ready to answer and give explanations for every question asked.

Conclusion

With the previous step concluded, this discussion of the Cisco TelePresence Planning, Design, and Implementation Service is complete.