Download Administrator guide as PDFConference distribution
All Pexip Infinity services (Virtual Meeting Rooms, Virtual Auditoriums, Virtual Receptions and the Pexip Distributed Gateway) exist on all Conferencing Nodes. When a user dials in to a Virtual Meeting Room, or Virtual Auditorium a conference instance is created. This conference can exist across one or more Conferencing Nodes. Where two or more Conferencing Nodes are involved, they send the call media between each other over a secure IPsec backplane.
When you first deploy a Conferencing Node, you select its system location, which is a user-defined parameter that tells Pexip Infinity where the Conferencing Node is physically located. Conferences that involve more than one Conferencing Node can be locally distributed, globally distributed, or both, depending on the system location of each of the Conferencing Nodes involved. Each of these distribution scenarios are described in more detail below.
Locally distributed conferences
Locally distributed conference with two Conferencing Nodes across two host servers in the same location
Locally distributed conferences exist across two or more Conferencing Nodes in the same physical location (i.e. nodes with the same System location selected) as shown in the diagram above.
Having more than one Conferencing Node in a single location allows you to increase capacity and provide redundancy.
To maintain efficiency, no more than three Conferencing Nodes in a single location will handle the media for a particular conference instance. However, you can configure "overflow" locations that will handle the media when the original location reaches its capacity for a conference instance. For more information, see Handling of media and signaling and Location capacity overflow.
Globally distributed conferences
Globally distributed conferences exist across two or more Conferencing Nodes in different physical locations (i.e. nodes with a different System location selected). This allows participants in different regions to access the conference from their local Conferencing Node. Call media is sent between the Conferencing Nodes on behalf of all the endpoints connected to them, thus minimizing WAN bandwidth usage between locations.
This helps to provide a superior meeting experience as it reduces the distance that the media has to travel between the endpoint / client and the Conferencing Nodes.
Locally and globally distributed conferences
Locally and globally distributed conference with four Conferencing Nodes across four host servers in three locations
Conferences can also be locally and globally distributed at the same time, if two or more Conferencing Nodes in one location and at least one other Conferencing Node in a different location are involved. In such cases, one Conferencing Node in each location will act as the proxy for any other Conferencing Nodes in the same location that are handling the media for that conference. Call media for each location is sent between the proxies only, thus minimizing WAN bandwidth usage between locations.