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Cisco Personal Assistant 1.4 Installation and Administration Guide
OL-4590-03
Chapter 1 Planning for Personal Assistant
Creating Server Clusters
2. Choose a server, for example the MCS-7835-H1-IPC1.
3. Determine how to install the Personal Assistant components, for example, whether you want the
Personal Assistant server and speech-recognition servers on separate systems.
4. Determine how many sessions you must support for your users:
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1750 users divided by 25 = 70 call-interception sessions
–
1750 users divided by 50 = 35 speech-recognition sessions
You need enough servers to support at least this number of sessions. When you configure the servers,
you specify the actual number of ports in use, so if you intend to use fewer than the maximum, take
this into consideration when determining the number of servers that you need.
5. Use the information in Table 1-2 to determine that if you install the Personal Assistant server and
the speech-recognition server on separate MCS-7835-H1-IPC1 systems (for a total of two systems)
you can support:
–
70 call-interception sessions
–
36 speech-recognition sessions
Therefore, you can support 1750 users by using two MCS-7835-H1-IPC1 systems: one system for
the Personal Assistant server and one system for the speech-recognition server.
6. Be sure to add the servers by using the Personal Assistant administrative interface:
–
Add the speech-recognition servers to the System Configuration settings. See the “Configuring
Speech Recognition” section on page 4-4.
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Add the Personal Assistant servers to the Server Configuration settings. See the “Configuring
Personal Assistant Servers” section on page 4-10.
7. You also must add the number of supported ports by using the Personal Assistant administrative
interface:
–
Add the supported number of media ports in the Server Configuration settings. See the
“Configuring Personal Assistant Servers” section on page 4-10. Although your selected server
configuration supports up to 36 ports, you only need 35 ports for your users.
–
Add the interceptor port addresses in Server Configuration settings. See the “Configuring
Personal Assistant Servers” section on page 4-10. In this setting, enter the interceptor ports that
cover all 1750 users. Although your configuration supports 70 simultaneous sessions, the
interceptor ports must cover all users you are supporting.
8. Consider configuring load balancing (see the “Setting Up Personal Assistant Server Load
Balancing” section on page 1-13) or adding failover servers (see the “Creating a Personal Assistant
Server Cluster With Failover” section on page 1-15) for greater redundancy.
Setting Up Personal Assistant Server Load Balancing
A single Personal Assistant server can handle a number of simultaneous sessions, which you define
when you set the number of media ports (see the “Server Configuration” section on page A-16). When
all media ports are being used, new callers receive a busy signal from Personal Assistant unless you set
up load balancing among the Personal Assistant servers in each Personal Assistant server cluster.
If you are not using failover servers, and if a Personal Assistant server becomes disabled, no other server
takes over the media ports of the disabled server. This reduces the number of available simultaneous
sessions with Personal Assistant. However, you can set up load balancing in the cluster to mitigate the
effects of a disabled server.