Polycom RealPresence 1800 Administration Manual page 376

Deployment of Soft Blades in a Modular MCU
A Soft Blade is deployed on a virtual machine.
A single Main MCU may control up to 20 Soft Blades.
Attempting to assign a Soft Blade to a Main MCU with full Soft Blade assignment, results in generating a
fault event on the Main MCU, indicating the maximum number of Soft Blades was reached for this particular
Main MCU.
Soft Blade Prerequisites
● For Soft Blade Host Hardware Profile, refer to RealPresence Collaboration Server
1800/2000/4000/Virtual Edition Release Notes.
● The virtual machine must use VMWare.
● All the MMCU components should be located on a single premise (co-located).
To deploy an MMCU from an existing MCU:
1 To turn your current MCU into a Main MCU, set its ENABLE_MODULAR_MCU system flag value to
MIX (recommended) or YES. For more information, see
Add system flag MMCU_BLOCK_TR_ABORTED MMCU and set the value to NO to enables the
recovery mechanism.
2 To install the Soft Blades, download from Polycom support site the Soft Blade OVA file (includes
Operating System, a console wizard, and a Salt minion), and install it.
In the support site, there are two OVA files. The Soft MCU OVA file name contains caxis-mcu,
whereas the one for the Soft Blade contains rppbase, and is also significantly smaller sized.
3 Deploy OVA file through vSphere client > File > Deploy OVA Template.
Note: OVA File Directives
• Deploy one OVA file at a time.
• If the Main MCU is a Collaboration Server VE, verify both the Main MCU and the Soft Blade OVA
files are the latest, which may entail a required upgrade of the Main MCU.
4 Via putty, log into the intended Soft Blade machine via the console wizard, with polycom as both
username and password, to display the Minion Setup menu.
Polycom, Inc.
Appendix - Modular MCU
MCU Operation Mode.
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