Adding Tandberg video end points to the network

A Tandberg MXP T150 was added to the network today. The T150 is similar to that pictured on http://www.tandberg.com/products/video_systems/tandberg_150_mxp.jsp but without the telephone handset. It was initially configured to contact the corporate gatekeeper and so this was changed to point to the lab environment.

Using the Exchange Integration Init as described on page 24 of the Tandberg Exchange Integration Installation Manual, the end point was added as a domain user. This allows the end point to be booked as a resource via Outlook Calendar. As described on page 27, the user is configured to automatically allow meeting requests. When I logged on as the newly created user, there was an email in the Outlook inbox explaining this. The setting is “Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations”. This can be found on the resource scheduling settings of the Outlook calendar options. The Office online help page http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP052432221033.aspx shows the steps. In this instance, the option had been set correctly though a warning on page 27 suggests this might not always be the case.

At this point the video end point is known to TMS as a video end point and to Exhange as a bookable resource.

Installation of Tandberg’s LCS Integration products

Tandberg’s LCS integration enables both call and control of video end points by Microsoft’s Office Communicator client. Version 2.4 of the “Tandberg LCS Integration installation manual, getting started” guide was used during the installation. The LCS Integration package consists of two parts, the Tandberg SIP-CX Gateway and Tandberg Communicator Integration.

Tandberg SIP-CX Gateway.

The Tandberg SIP-CX Gateway provides a multi-participant conference facility when coupled with a Tandberg MPS.

Page 6 of the installation manual says “Do not install the SIP-CX gateway on the LCS Server as this will lead to problems with LCS setting up trusted sites”. Page 8 of the manual says “The SIP-CX gateway can be installed on the TMS server, the LCS server or a dedicated server. The only difference is that if installing it on the LCS server, the default SIP-CX port (5060) cannot be used for the LCS/SIP-CX gateway communication as it will cause port conflicts with the LCS software”. This is somewhat conflicting advice. I chose to go with a seperate server as Server3 is only running Tandberg’s TMS. for performance reasons, you would want this to be on a dedicated server for typical deployments. The diagram on page 10 shows the port settings. I chose to change from the default 5060 to 5080 just so I could see how a slightly different configuration can be done from the LCS configuration tools when establishing an authorised host (page 14) and most importantly during the steps described on pages 16 and 17 as this is where the port setting is entered when creating the static route. As there is no CA for the domain, I didn’t select a HTTPS connection to the TMS server as shown on page 10. As per the advice on page 17 suggesting the use of a different domain, I chose horizon.sip for conferences. A copy of the conferences.xml file was made and then using the Tandberg LCS Configuration tool as shown on page 37, a demo config was created.

Tandberg Communicator Integration

The Tandberg Communicator Integration is an extension to Microsoft’s Office Communicator and adds a Tandberg tab to the client.

TandbergCommunicatorIntegrationPreRequirements.msi was run on the LCS server followed by TandbergCommunicatorIntegration.msi. I created a local user called TandbergCommunicator as per page 34 and as per suggestion on page 35, a domain user called VideoConferenceAssistant. VideoConferenceAssistant is used as a bot for sending feedback to Office Communicator clients.

The Tandberg Communicator Integration Configuration tool TLCSConfigTool.exe was run to generate the registry file containing the Office Communicator extensions. As only a few clients are involved, I manually imported the .reg file on each workstation. When Office Communicator was restarted, the Tandberg tab was visible on the bottom of the client. The extension is essentially a customised http interface to the TMS. Unfortunately the tab was not visible on all of the clients and Appendix 4 covers adding the TMS server as a trusted site. Once Office Communicator was restarted, the tab was visible.

Rather than editing the IM filter as per Appendix 2, the filter was disabled using the LCS MMC. Obviously in a live environment, the filter would be edited to allow traffic from the Tandberg bot.

Current components on the servers in the lab

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Installing Tandberg’s Exchange Integration product

Tandberg’s Exchange Integration product is an addition to TMS and connects TMS and the video end points to Exchange and Outlook. This provides the ability to schedule conferences and book meetings from within Outlook. Now we are getting to the nitty gritty of the integration project! In essence, it’s a database synchronisation tool. Meetings which are booked in TMS need to be known to Exchange and vice versa. Exchange uses a sink to allow a process to run when calendar data is created or modified. This is a hook into an event system. Before the calendar data is written, the event triggers a request to the TMS database to ascertain if it is possible to make the booking. The answer comes back as either true or false. If it’s true, the meeting is booked in Exchange as well as in TMS. A “synchronizer” takes care of sync-ing booking from TMS into Exchange.

The product requires the following:

• MSXML 4.0 SP2
• SOAP 3.0
• WinHTTP 5.1
• Windows scripting host 5.6
• Microsoft Component Category Manager Library
• Microsoft Windows Common Controls (5&6)
• Microsoft Visual Basic Virtual Machine 6.0

A license is required to be entered around step 7 on page 11 of the “Tandberg Exchange Integration Installation Manual”. I don’t think this is mentioned in the manual.

The product was installed on Server1 which also hosts the Exchange server. No problems have been found so far.

Busy weekend

I’ve added another server (server3) to the domain as the host server still has resources to spare.

Server1 is the DC for HorizonSolutions.local

Server2 runs Microsoft’s Live Communications Server 2005

Server3 runs Tandberg’s TMS (Tandberg Management System)

The installation of LCS 2005 went smoothly but upon restart, the SQL Server Manager on Server2 fails to find the instance. A quick fix was to enter the server_IP_address\rtc, click “refresh services” then manually start the LCS service. I’d usually spend more time on looking for a fix but as long as the service starts and we have a painless workaround, then the most important task is to get the Tandberg integration products installed and working.

Tandberg’s TMS needs IIS, asp.net and snmp. Not sure why it needs the snmp service. Must find out as snmp, ldap and sip are the protocols I’m really interested in. With the prerequisits installed, TMS installed ok and the server needed a reboot. It came back without any hickups. The TMS interface can be found at http://server/tms.

Tandberg provide fairly detailed installation instructions which can be downloaded as part of the intergration package from http://www.tandberg.com/products/tms_form.jsp

Cooking with gas

We are up and running with a real beast of a server, a Sunfire X4200. The host OS is Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise with SP2. The VM platform is VMware Workstation version 6.0. Sorry Microsoft, I prefer WMware to Virtual PC.

The Sun server has 8Gb of memory and will be upgraded with another 8Gb later. The server specs can be found here.

The server is fully patched and Remote Desktop is enabled.

Virtual Machines

Server1 and Server2 are also running Win 2k3 R2 Enterprise.  Initially I called the domain Horizon.local but later realised HorizonSolutions.local would have been better.  Rather than rename the domain, I reverted to a previous VMware snapshot.

As this is a test environment and a virtual one at that, server optimisation as far as what services run on what servers is far from the best.  Clearly if the project specification was to design and build an optimised solution rather than a proof of concept, a different approach would have been taken.