Expanding Capacity By Joining Mcus Together - Avaya Scopia XT Series Deployment Manual

Expanding capacity by joining MCUs together

About this task
When the number of Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) ports available on a single XT Series with an
active Embedded MCU license (three or eight, depending to your license) falls short of the number
of participants in a large meeting, you can connect one XT Series endpoint to another MCU in
order to create larger conferences. You can achieve the maximum number of connected users
when eight remote subordinate/secondary MCU9 units are connected to a controlling/primary
MCU9 unit, achieving 8*8+1=65 connected users in a single conference. You can mix several
MCU4 and MCU9 units, enabling you to achieve a broad range of conference dimensions, with a
unique flexibility.
This technique is called "MCU cascading" and involves dialing from one MCU conference to
another MCU conference. Each called MCU is seen as an additional participant on the local MCU
conference. This technique limits the experience available to participants because they can only
see a some of the participants on one MCU. The cascade occurs between a single primary MCU
and one or more secondary MCUs, all supporting cascading. You can connect endpoints to the
primary or secondary MCUs. These "MCU to MCU" connections use up a port on each secondary
MCU and one port per secondary MCU on the primary MCU. During a cascaded conference,
usually the video from the active speaker (participant who is talking, or the last who talked) on a
secondary MCU is sent to the primary MCU. On the primary MCU, the video from all secondary
MCUs and the directly attached endpoints are mixed in accordance with the conference layout,
which is usually a continuous presence layout. This view is then sent back to each secondary
MCU, which then forwards this to its endpoints by re-encoding it according to the capabilities of
the connected endpoints. If not configured, primary/secondary determination when a call is placed
between two MCUs is random, and does not depend on the direction of the call. As the primary/
secondary determination changes the visualization of the meeting, Avaya recommends
configuring the determination in advance. For instance, if you need participants at rooms A, B, and
C to be always seen by everyone, while others rooms can be seen only if they have questions,
you can configure the XT Series at room A as the primary MCU, connect B and C directly to MCU
A and connect all other participants to other XT Seriess (secondary MCUs), connected to A.
Note:
Do not change the default MCU role configuration unless you are planning a meeting in
advance.
Before you begin
If configuring from the endpoint, you must first enable advanced configuration, as described in
Enabling Advanced Maintenance on the XT Series
Procedure
1. Access the MCU settings. From the XT Series web interface, select Administrator
Settings > Calls > Preferences > MCU. From the endpoint's main menu, select
Configure > Advanced > Calls > Preferences > MCU.
2. Set the MCU Role:
• Master represents the primary or controlling MCU.
• Slave represents the secondary or subordinate MCU.
December 2017 Avaya Video Collaboration Solution for IP Office Deployment Guide
Comments on this document? infodev@avaya.com
Expanding capacity by joining MCUs together
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