Hardware resource allocation rules

A number of different types of connections are required for a conference to take place, or for a gateway call to be made. A connection can be a call or presentation from an endpoint to a Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium, a backplane between Conferencing Nodes, or a call into or out of the Pexip Distributed Gateway. In this context, a connection is analogous to a port.

Each of these connections requires a certain amount of resource, or capacity. In general, the amount of resource required for each connection can be categorized as:

• audio-only
• standard definition (SD)
• high definition (HD - 720p), or
• Full HD (1080p).

The following rules determine how hardware resources are allocated and consumed by conference and gateway calls in a Pexip Infinity deployment:

• Each HD participant uses one HD connection.
• If these are Lync / Skype for Business participants, they each require one additional HD connection when sending or receiving presentation.
• If these are WebRTC participants, the presenter requires one additional HD connection for sending presentation.
• Standards-based endpoints (SIP or H.323) do not require an additional connection when sending or receiving presentation.

• Each conference instance on each node reserves 1 HD connection for a backplane, to allow the conference to become geographically distributed if required. The exceptions to this are:

  • Deployments with a single Conferencing Node. In such cases, no backplanes will ever be required, so capacity is not reserved.
  • Conferences that are audio-only (in other words, where the conference has its Conference capabilities set to Audio-only). In such cases, capacity equivalent to one audio connection is reserved for the backplane.
  • Deployments with 1080p enabled. In such cases, backplanes reserve 1 Full HD connection of capacity, approximately double that of an HD connection.
• Only one backplane connection is used for each conference on each Conferencing Node, regardless of the number of other Conferencing Nodes that are involved in the conference.
• A gateway call does not reserve resource for a backplane, but will use one if required (for example, if the participants are connected to different Conferencing Nodes).
• SD quality can be enforced by reducing the bandwidth of a service or gateway call to 960 kbps or less. Pexip Infinity will consume less resource per-call, however, it will still reserve an HD connection for the backplane.
• Note that if an API participant is the first participant to join a conference, it will reserve a backplane for the conference.

See Pexip Infinity license installation and usage for full information about how call licenses are consumed.

We have provided some resource allocation examples and a deployment case study to help illustrate these rules in practice.