Configuration topics
Cisco TelePresence Management Suite Installation and Getting Started Guide
Page 45 of 70
Cisco TMS routing and zones
To automate conferencing and increase reliability, Cisco TMS actively manipulates dialing information
shown to users and systems by interpreting the status and configuration of systems it is managing and
understanding of the network. This reduces the technical details that users need to understand. All of
these decisions are handled automatically by Cisco TMS.
This information is defines as Zones, and Cisco TMS uses this configuration information to coordinate
and integrate with connected networks. There are IP Zones, and ISDN zones. The administrator
defines the zones that represent their network, and then systems in Cisco TMS are automatically
associated with the zone. During installation, two Zones are defined named ‘Default’.
These need to be expanded upon to implement a network that goes beyond a single location. Zones
are created and managed in Cisco TMS in Administrative Tools > Locations.
ISDN zones
ISDN zones define the ISDN network in a location. A location is an area that all has the same ISDN
dialing behavior: Therefore, a location could be as small as a building or as large as an entire city or
state, but all the systems assigned to a zone must share all the same ISDN dialing information:
•
Country/Region - Defines which dialing rules to use. For example, do I dial 011 or 00 to dial
international calls?
•
Area code – Allows Cisco TMS to make determinations about long distance dialing.
•
Line prefixes – Defines any prefix digits – such as dialing 9 to get an outside line from a
PBX.
•
Digits to dial for internal calls – How many digits to dial when making calls between
systems in the same ISDN zone. For example, if you are using a PBX, it may only be
necessary to dial the last 4 digits between two local systems.
•
Area Code Rules – Used to further tweak the dialing behavior of Cisco TMS with regards to
local and long distance calling.
How many ISDN Zones you need to represent your network depends on how many different ISDN
dialing behaviors there are. If systems share the identical settings for the above properties, they can
share the same ISDN Zone.
All ISDN numbers in Cisco TMS are stored as ‘fully qualified numbers’; that is, the number is entered
and shown as the full number, including its country code information. For example: a US phone
number is shown as +1 703 7094281 and a Norwegian phone number is: +47 67125125. By storing
numbers in a fully qualified format instead of how one system dials a number, the same number can
be used by any system in the world because Cisco TMS (with ISDN Zones) knows how to manipulate
the number so that any of the systems it manages can dial it properly.
IP zones
The job of an IP zone is twofold – to create the idea of locality in an IP network, and to provide
information for connecting from the IP network using Gateways and URI dialing.
IP Zones are purely logical entities and do not necessarily map to any physical boundary. Cisco TMS
uses IP Zones to influence its routing decisions because it relates to distance to answer the question
‘Which system is closer to me?’ Two systems that are both in the same IP Zone would be considered
‘local’ to each other. Locality affects choices such as selecting an MCU – a local MCU may be
preferred. IP Zones also provide gateway and dialing information about the network a system is
attached to. If an organization does not have widespread IP connectivity between sites, and prefers to
use ISDN when making certain connections, that is also controllable through IP Zones.
For most organizations, IP Zones provide gateway information for the IP network. The number of IP
Zones needed is based on how many gateway paths there are to the network. For more diverse
networks with distributed MCUs, IP Zones can also be used to control which MCU is preferred for
different groups of endpoints.
