HCL Sametime: Make Your Meetings Deployment and Administration Easy
- Justin Hill
- Apr 28, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
On April 20 it was HCL Sametime’s turn to step into the spotlight with a webinar from HCL, focusing on deployment and administration.
From an administrative point of view there are a number of issues that can appear when deploying an on-premise AV Solution :
Multiple Servers to deploy
Network challenges
Managing clients
Scalability concerns, Hardware investments
On the other side, using a Public cloud service has its challenges as well:
Controlling your data – being assured of who is in your meetings
Managing clients and capabilities
Cost
This is where Sametime comes with some great improvements. HCL Sametime has a more simplified deployment:
Single Node ‘Docker’ deployments
Multiple Node, scalable Kubernetes deployments
Both can be installed and running in hours – not days (or more) as in previous releases.
No clients to install, no plugins to download
Only requires 2 ports to be open!
You have full control of your AV environment
OnPrem and cloud-based deployments are fully supported
Planning
The first step you need to take when considering deploying HCL Sametime is planning. In order to make the process as smooth as possible, you will need to decide on some important points, the most important one being the environment where you want to deploy HCL Sametime: On-prem, cloud, hybrid.
Next, you will need to determine the location from where your users will be joining from. Will they be internal or external users?
The meeting size is also subject to planning, especially in terms of scalability of the environment. As an example, if you have a lot of little team meetings and nothing big, you might want to choose a simpler deployment for Docker. If you have a mixed situation with lots of both big and small meetings you will be interested in a more scalable option on Kubernetes.
Another parameter that needs to be addressed in the planning stage is whether you will record meetings and how often you will do that since you will need extra resources for that.
High-Availability requirements are also an important topic to talk about at this point of your deployment. Both Docker and Kubernetes are stable platforms. Once they are up and running there is not a lot that needs to be done to keep them running.
Deployment
HCL Sametime comes with an easy deployment, you have 4 components to install:
MongoDB
Data Storage
Sametime Community Server
Provides Instant Messaging and Authentication
Sametime Proxy Server
Provides services for Mobile and Web clients
Sametime Meetings Server
Provides for Meeting and Audio Video
HCL Sametime Meetings Docker Deployment:
Intended for a small deployments and POC type environments
Limited number of users
Easiest to install and configure
Fully supported for production
Does not support automatic scaling, limited number of ‘recorders’
Must have Community and Proxy 11.5 installed and configured
Installation:
Install Docker (if not already present)
Unzip sametime_meetings.zip
Modify custom.env file for local settings
Run install.sh
Configure Community and Proxy
Enable meeting feature in Policy
policies.user.xml – im.meetingsEnabled
Add JWT settings to Community and Proxy configuration
HCL Sametime Meetings Kubernetes Deployment:
Intended for production deployments
Supports autoscaling thru Kubernetes
Requires a customer to have a full Kubernetes environment and experience
This is the suggested and recommended deployment model
The Kubernetes deployment is a bit more complicated, but just a bit:
Prerequisites
Must have Community and Proxy 11.5 installed and configured
Kubernetes v1.16.0 or later with an ingress controller
Helm v3.1.2
Installation
Unzip the sametime_meetings.zip
Deploy the docker images (./load.sh)
Configure secrets (./generateSecrets.sh)
Create the recordings volume • Edit the global configuration (vi values.yaml)
Deploy the helm chart (helm install sametime-meetings .)
Configure Community and Proxy
Enable Meeting Feature in Policy
policies.users.xml –im.meetingsEnabled
Add JWT Settings to Community and Proxy Configuration
HCL Sametime Administration
Once you have finished installing, be it Docker or Kubernetes there is not that much to do with the administration.
Meetings – how to find logs
How to get/monitor statistics
How you can get value from this capability
Tips and tricks on clusters, real production environments
Show commands on how to determine systems
The replay of the webinar is available for you to watch and also HCL has some more resources for you to check out:
Monitoring And Statistics Whitepaper
If you want to talk to us about HCL Sametime hosting, drop us a line.
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