Overview for administering topology

The topology of a Messaging system is the relationship between the application servers and the sites that the topology supports. You can define this relationship on the Topology Web page. Use the Topology Web page to:

List the sites that you previously defined on the Sites Web page.
Assign an application server to a site.
Change the topology by adding or deleting application servers.

You define topology properties on the storage server, which then applies these properties to the associated application servers.

In a single-server topology, you can manage application and storage roles on the same server.
In a front-end/back-end topology, you can manage all application roles on the server that has been assigned the storage role. The location of the application servers, relative to the storage server, can be local or remote.

Application clusters

You can combine up to four application servers to form a cluster. Each cluster connects to one storage server and supports the same telephony server.

By clustering application servers, you can:

Increase the system capacity so the application server can support more users. Every application server you add to the cluster increases the number of available ports.
Provide redundancy for any application server in the same cluster. Application servers within a cluster are configured identically and are, therefore, interchangeable.

Important

All servers in a cluster must be in the same time zone. If your organization spans multiple time zones and if your system topology includes application server clusters, then you need to configure one cluster for each time zone.