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.