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AE Services and Sametime Clustering Guidelines

The guidelines here are meant to assist with the planning of an AE Services click-to-call and Telephony Presence installation in a cluster of AE Services and Sametime servers. There are many different ways to cluster Sametime and AE Services servers together. However, this section will only focus on two of those configurations. Although the focus is only on two clustering scenarios, the guidelines and considerations here should be applied to any clustered environment.

First, there are two aspects of an enterprise Sametime server configuration that distinguish it from a smaller scale, standalone Sametime server configuration: Sametime clusters and the standalone Sametime multiplexer.

In a standalone Sametime server configuration, the Sametime multiplexer (or mux) is actually installed on the same machine as the Sametime server. In an enterprise configuration, the mux is installed on a separate machine. Whether it is installed on the same machine or standalone, the mux manages the potentially very large number of sockets to the Sametime clients, tunneling their traffic to the Sametime server over a significantly smaller number of sockets. Putting the mux on a separate machine off loads the overhead of managing those sockets, thereby increasing the number of connections that a single Sametime server can handle.

In addition to the Standalone mux, Sametime clusters can be viewed as a farm of horizontal or vertical servers configured to load balance and provide redundancy. The majority of the servers in the Sametime family can be clustered in various ways and can result in multiple instances of the Community Server or Media Manager components. This requires additional configuration which is described in this section so please review the following notes before installing and configuring your clustered environment.