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Cisco ISR G2 as a Video Bridge
The VCB functions aren’t as sophisticated and advanced as it’s more expensive, dedicated counterparts, but in many implementations it may be adequate. For example, an IOS VCB can only do voice switched, active speaker conferencing and not continuous presence (what I like to refer to as the Brady Bunch style) conferencing.
The capacity of the bridge depends on the the amount of DSP resources you have available, the type of bridge you have configured and the quality of the calls you are conferencing. There are two types of bridge configurations available on the ISR G2 – homogenous and heterogeneous. Homogenous video conference bridges take less DSP resources, but require all end points to connect at the same bitrate, quality and codec. Heterogeneous video conference bridges take significantly more DSP resources, but allow you to mix and match the video formats. This is useful when you want to connect multiple client types such as Cisco 9900 series phones and Cisco Unified Video Advantage software clients, but if you only have a single type of video endpoint you should use a homogenous configuration to conserve resources.
Configuring the video conference bridge will require you to accept and activate the IOS UCVideo license in evaluation mode. I spent a good deal of time investigating how to purchase this license without any success. After asking for guidance from several people at Cisco I finally ended up being told that the evaluation status is misleading, as the license will become a permanent license at the end of the trial period, and that no additional license (other than the basic UC license) needs to be purchased. At the time of writing this article I am still in the evaluation period so I cannot confirm or deny this. I’ll be sure to provide an update when something happens.
Configuration Example – Homogenous Conference Bridge
This is a homogenous bridge configured to support the 9900 series IP Phone Handsets that use the H.264 video format.
voice-card 0 voice-service dsp-reservation 70 dsp services dspfarm ! sccp local GigabitEthernet0/0 sccp ccm 10.10.10.1 identifier 1 version 7.0 sccp ccm 10.10.10.2 identifier 3 version 7.0 sccp ! sccp ccm group 1 associate ccm 1 priority 1 associate ccm 2 priority 2 associate profile 1 register myroutervid ! dspfarm profile 1 conference video homogeneous codec g729br8 codec g729r8 codec g729abr8 codec g729ar8 codec g711alaw codec g711ulaw codec g722-64 codec h264 cif frame-rate 30 bitrate 320kbps maximum sessions 4 associate application SCCP !
Configuration Example – Heterogeneous Conference Bridge
This is a heterogeneous bridge configured to support the Cisco Unified Video Advantage clients, Cisco 7985 IP Phone handsets and Cisco 9900 series IP Phone Handsets that use a variety of video formats.
voice-card 0 voice-service dsp-reservation 70 dsp services dspfarm ! sccp local GigabitEthernet0/0 sccp ccm 10.10.10.1 identifier 1 version 7.0 sccp ccm 10.10.10.2 identifier 3 version 7.0 sccp ! sccp ccm group 1 associate ccm 1 priority 1 associate ccm 2 priority 2 associate profile 1 register myroutervid ! dspfarm profile 1 conference video heterogeneous codec g729br8 codec g729r8 codec g729abr8 codec g729ar8 codec g711alaw codec g711ulaw codec g722-64 codec h264 cif codec h264 qcif codec h264 vga maximum sessions 4 associate application SCCP !
