Requirements for Sharing Enhanced Location Based Call Admission Control Bandwidth Usage Between Clusters

BCE.

Recommendations and Design Considerations for Unified CM Session Management Edition DeploymentsAll leaf clusters that support E-L CAC should be enabled for intercluster E-L CAC with SME.SME can be used as a centralized bootstrap hub for the E-L CAC intercluster hub replication network.

See LBM Hub Replication Network, for more information.All trunks to leaf clusters supporting E-L CAC should be SIP trunks placed in the shadow location to enable E-L CAC on the trunk between SME and the leaf clusters supporting E-L CAC.For TelePresence video interoperability, see the section on Call Admission Control Design Recommendations for TelePresence Video Interoperability Architectures.Connectivity from SME to any trunk or device other than a Unified CM that supports E-L CAC (some examples are third-party PBXs, gateways, Unified CM clusters prior to release 9.0 that do not support E-L CAC, voice messaging ports or trunks to conference bridges, Cisco Video Communications Server, and so forth) should be configured in a location other than a phantom or shadow location.

The reason for this is that both phantom and shadow locations are non- terminating locations; that is, they relay information about locations and are effectively placeholders for user-defined locations on other clusters.

Phantom locations are legacy locations that allow for the transmission of location information in versions of Unified CM prior to 9.0, but they are not supported with Unified CM 9.x Enhanced Locations CAC.

Shadow locations are special locations that enable trunks between Unified CM clusters that support E-L CAC to accomplish it end-to- end.SME can be used as a locations and link management cluster.

Enhanced Location Based Call Admission Control (ELCAC) is a feature in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) that provides the ability to control calls based on the location of devices and the available bandwidth. When ELCAC is enabled, calls are only allowed if there is enough bandwidth available in the location where the call is being made. To share ELCAC bandwidth usage between clusters, the following three requirements must be met:

1. The Cisco Unified Communications Manager version must be 8.6 or higher: The ability to share ELCAC bandwidth usage between clusters was introduced in CUCM version 8.6. Therefore, to share ELCAC bandwidth usage between clusters, both clusters must be running CUCM version 8.6 or higher.

2. The location name must be the same on both clusters: For ELCAC to work across multiple clusters, the location name must be the same on both clusters. This is because ELCAC uses the location name to identify and track the available bandwidth in each location.

3. A Location Bandwidth Manager Hub Group must be created for each cluster: A Location Bandwidth Manager (LBM) Hub Group is a logical grouping of LBM servers that communicate with each other to exchange bandwidth usage information. To share ELCAC bandwidth usage between clusters, a separate LBM Hub Group must be created for each cluster. The LBM Hub Group must include at least two LBM servers in each cluster.

Option A is incorrect because it only specifies the minimum version of CUCM required to use ELCAC.

Option C is incorrect because it refers to SIP Intercluster Trunk (ICT), which is not directly related to ELCAC.

Option D is incorrect because the Location Bandwidth Manager Service should be started on all servers that will participate in the LBM Hub Group, not just two servers in each cluster.

Option E is correct because a separate LBM Hub Group must be created for each cluster to share ELCAC bandwidth usage between clusters.

Option F is incorrect because links do not need to be created to the Shadow location for ELCAC to work across multiple clusters. The Shadow location is used to provide a fallback location for devices when the primary location is not available.