The Shared Data Repository (SDR) is the central database for Cisco HCS. This repository stores data that is common to multiple Cisco HCS components.

The Shared Data Repository provides Cisco HCS with the following benefits:

• Reduces duplicate data entry and data inconsistency

• Integrates Cisco HCS components, which provides architectural stability

• Shared Data Repository is utilized by HCS License Manager, Service Inventory, and Platform Manager

The Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository supports the following functional areas:

• HCM-Fulfillment — Allows a service provider to provision a new enterprise customer with voice, video and other collaboration and mobility services, as required.

• HCM-Service Assurance — Supports fault and performance management.

One Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository is installed when you install Cisco HCM-F on the Cisco HCM-F platform.

Internal components of the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository identify the type of client that is communicating with the database; for example, the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository can identify whether the client serves as a sync agent. Because of this ability to identify the client, the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository assists with debugging by allowing the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository to record the client name in log messages. An internal component of the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository prevents clients that are accessing the same data from overwriting changes that occur at the same time. In addition, the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository provides clients with change notification.

The following sources update the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository:

• Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager

• The Cisco HCM-F northbound interface API

• VCenterSync, UCSMSync, and CUCDMSync—These synchronization services read data from the data source and write the data to the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository

• The Cisco HCM-F administrative interface

External clients, such as the service provider Operations Support System (OSS)/Business Support System (BSS), interact with the Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository through Cisco HCM-F northbound interface APIs.

The Cisco HCS Shared Data Repository indicates whether data is read-only to clients such as the Cisco HCS administrative interface. In this case, the administrative interface indicates that the administrator cannot edit the content.

Infrastructure Platform Automation (IPA) automates the provisioning steps for onboarding customers inside both the Cisco Unified Communications Manager application and the Cisco Unity Connection by using an XML configuration file that is loaded in Infrastructure Manager within the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Mediation-Fulfillment (HCM-F) interface. The automation process includes Virtual Machine cloning and running identity on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Cisco Unity Connection Publisher and Subscriber Virtual Machines. If the Virtual Machines are pre-cloned, for example by Cloud-O or manually, IPA performs only identity operations on Virtual Machines.

Both Unified Communications Manager clusters and Cisco Unity Connection clusters can have only one Publisher, and only one Unity Subscriber node per cluster is supported. The IPA XML must always contain the Unified Communications Manager Cluster information, but the Cisco Unity Connection Cluster information is optional. You can deploy Cisco Unified Communications Manager without Cisco Unity Connection but not the reverse. Cisco Unity Connection Publishers and Subscribers both use the skip install process. Cisco Unity Connection and Cisco Unified Communications Manager share the same ISO file for installation, but they each have their own OVA file which must be used for deploying VMs for IPA use.

Note

IPA supports only specific versions of Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection cluster deployments. See the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution Compatibility Matrix for details on which Cisco HCM-F version works with Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection versions. The cluster ID is one of the manual parameters, and you must configure the cluster on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Cisco Unity Connection before configuring in the Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager.

Note

Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment helps you manage Unified Communications (UC) applications (release 10.x and later). Its primary high-level functions are to: Migrate a cluster of UC servers to a new cluster (such as MCS to virtual, or virtual to virtual). Tip Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment does not delete the source cluster VMs after migration is complete. You can fail over to the source VMs if there is a problem with the new VMs. When you are satisfied with the migration, you can manually delete the source VMs. Perform operations on clusters, such as: Upgrade Switch version Restart Fresh install a new release 10.x UC cluster Change IP addresses or hostnames in release 10.x clusters (for a network migration). Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment supports simple migration and network migration. Changing IP addresses or hostnames is not required for a simple migration. For more information, see the Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment Administration Guide. For additional information on Prime Collaboration Deployment and HCS see Prime Collaboration Deployment for UC Applications

Note	In this document, the term License Manager refers to both Enterprise License Manager and Prime License Manager.

HLM runs as a stand-alone Java application on the Hosted Collaboration Mediation Fulfillment platform, utilizing Cisco Hosted Collaboration Mediation Fulfillment service infrastructure and message framework. There is one HLM per install of Cisco HCS. HLM and its associated License Manager manage licenses for Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unity Connection, and TelePresence Room.

If it is not running, start HLM using the following command: utils service start Cisco HCS License Manager Service. This service must be running to provide HLM functionality.

Note	There is no licensing requirement for Presence Service and Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM.

HCS supports multiple deployment modes. A deployment mode can be Cisco HCS, Cisco HCS-Large Enterprise (HCS-LE) or Enterprise. Each Prime License Manager is added with a deployment mode and all UC clusters added to the License Manager must have the same deployment mode the License Manager. License Managers with different deployment mode can be added to HCM-F. When adding License Manager the Default Deployment mode is selected by default, but it can be manually changed by selecting a different deployment mode from drop down menu.

Through the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Mediation Fulfillment NBI or GUI, an administrator can create, read, or delete a License Manager instance in Cisco HCS. A Cisco Hosted Collaboration Mediation Fulfillment administrator cannot perform any licensing management function until HLM validates its connection to the installed License Manager and its license file is uploaded. HLM exposes an interface to list all of the License Manager instances.

After the administrator adds and validates a License Manager instance to the HLM, you can assign a customer to the License Manager. This action does not automatically assign all Cisco Unified CM and Cisco Unity Connection clusters within this customer to that License Manager. The administrator must assign each Cisco Unified CM or Cisco Unity Connection cluster to a License Manager after the associated customer is assigned to that License Manager. If the customer is not assigned to License Manager, the cluster assignment fails, and you are advised to associate the customer with an License Manager first.

The administrator can unassign a UC cluster from a License Manager through the HLM NBI or GUI.

For more information about Prime License Manager, see Cisco Prime License Manager User Guide.

HLM supports License Report generation. The report includes all customers on the system with aggregate license consumption at the customer level.

An optional field Deal ID at the customer level is included in the report. Each customer has zero or more Deal IDs that can be configured through the HCM-F GUI.

The Administrator requests the system-level Cisco HCS license report through the HLM GUI or NBI. The report request generates two files: csv, and xlsx format. Both files are saved into the HLM license report repository (/opt/hcs/hlm/reports/system) for future download. The retention period of the report is set to 60 days by default.

The Cisco HCS Fulfillment service is a standalone Java application. It performs the following functions:

• To trigger provisioning of Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance, the fulfillment service automatically detects data changes in the SDR related to devices, and triggers the DMA-SA to provision those devices.

• To trigger the Cisco HCS Provisioning Adapter (CHPA) service to add some Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance configuration to Cisco Unified Communication Manager application nodes.

• To automatically link a virtual machine to an application instance within the SDR, a blade to an ESXi Host, and a customer to Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance.

The following sections describe the functions of the fulfillment service.

Overview

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance is a member of the Cisco Unified Communications family of products. It provides a comprehensive and efficient solution for network management and allows you to provision and monitor Cisco Unified Communications deployments.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance monitors and evaluates the current status of both the IP communications infrastructure and the underlying transport infrastructure in your network. Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance uses open interfaces such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to remotely poll data from different devices in the IP communications deployment.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance does not deploy any agent software on the devices being monitored and therefore is not disruptive to system operations.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance increases productivity of network managers by enabling them to isolate problems quickly using the following tools:

• Fault Monitor—Provides access to devices views, event summaries, device and event details, as well as access to other management tools on devices, clusters, and phones. This component makes navigating fault management easier and allows you to quickly view relevant information. You can set the context views based on site or device group.

• Device 360° View—Provides concise summary information for any device when you rest your mouse over a device IP address, then click the quick view icon. You can view device information such as status and location, view modules, alarms, and interfaces on the device, and invoke tools such as ping and traceroute for the device.

• Diagnostics—Provides access to key diagnostic tools and reports in one location. Distinct monitoring and diagnostic workflows allow you to quickly identify network data for analysis.
• Reports:
  • Event history
  • Audio IP phones
  • Personalized reports
  • Service quality history
  • Video IP phones
• Clickable information in notification messages---Includes context-sensitive links to more detailed information about service outages
• Context-sensitive links to other Cisco tools---Help you manage IP communications implementations

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance also performs the following functions:

• Supports device pools---Collects this information for various reports and displays. Service-quality and phone registration-related events can contain data at the device pool level.
• Supports event customizations---Event severity and description customizations are available across all displays and reports. You can also control events using suppression at the component level.
• Presents service-quality events---Uses information from Cisco Unified Service Monitor when it is also deployed for the following purposes:
  • Displays Mean Opinion Scores (MOSs) associated with poor voice quality between pairs of endpoints involved in a call. These endpoints can be Cisco Unified IP phones, Cisco Unity messaging systems, or voice gateways. It also displays other associated details about the voice-quality problem.
  • Enables you to perform a probable path trace between the two endpoints and reports on any outages or problems on intermediate nodes in the path.
• Highlights current connectivity-related and registration-related outages affecting Cisco Unified IP phones in the network. In addition, Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance provides contextual information that enables you to locate and identify the IP phones involved.
• Tracks IP communication devices and IP phone inventory---Tracks Cisco Unified IP phone status changes and creates a variety of reports that document move, add, and change operations on Cisco Unified IP phones in the network. All phone reports and personalized reports now show device pool and partition information for the IP phones.
• Provides easy to use, scalable reports---Displays large networks using visual cues in map views, as well as tabular reports to access management details of clusters and devices.

Migration

If not already done so, we recommend that you migrate from Cisco Prime Unified Operations Manager to Cisco Prime Collaboration using the Cisco HCM-F CLI command:

utils migrate cuom-to-primecollab

This moves all devices at once, retaining the association level to the domain manager.

You can also migrate individual clusters, customer equipment, or customers using the Cisco HCM-F GUI or the Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager GUI.

Supported solutions

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance supports various solutions:

• Call processing services
• Contact center services
• Voice messaging services
• Cisco Unified Presence services
• Conferencing services
• Mobility services
• Video/TelePresence services
• Endpoints (IP phones and soft clients)
  • Other voice application services
  • Infrastructure services

Supported Devices

In the Cisco HCS architecture, Domain Managers are components that manage, monitor, or control other solution services. Examples of domain managers are Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance, the Unified Communications Domain Manager, and vCenter.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance is a Cisco network management server for Cisco voice products. In the Cisco HCS solution, it is a domain manager that performs monitoring of Cisco HCS network applications and devices. It receives events from the monitored devices and forwards them to the Event Collector for processing.

The Domain Manager Adapter for the Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance (DMA-SA) integrates into the Cisco HCS solution. The DMA is an interface between the SDR and Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance. The key function of the DMA is to automatically configure Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance to monitor Cisco HCS devices and applications based on data from the SDR.

A second function of the DMA is to monitor Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance limits and generate an HCM-F alarm when thresholds are reached.

The DMA-SA relies on the HCS Fulfillment service to detect changes on the SDR. The HCS Fulfillment service monitors the SDR database for changes. In response to those changes, the HCS Fulfillment service then instructs the DMA-SA to configure the Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance to reflect changes on the SDR.

The DMA-SA can perform the following configuration changes:

• Add device

• Update device credentials

• Delete device

For instance, when a new device is added through vCenter and configured through the Unified Communications Domain Manager, the VCenterSync service and the CUCDMSync service update the SDR with the change. The Fulfillment service responds to the change in the SDR and instructs the DMA-SA to begin monitoring the new device. The DMA-SA then reads the device details from the SDR and programmatically configures the device (through SOAP) for monitoring in Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance. The CHPA also configures devices for monitoring.

Note that for the devices to be configured for monitoring, the following conditions must also be met:

• Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance must be added on the Cisco HCM-F Infrastructure Manager Administrative UI. It must also be configured with an IP address in the service provider space and a hostname, using ADMIN credentials.

  Note	Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution supports a single HCM-F with one or more PCA that is used to monitor. Different versions of Prime Collaboration Assurance running in the same environment is not supported.

• The customer (or application cluster or customer equipment) is linked to Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance. This function can be performed manually through the Cisco HCM-F UI, or automatically by the Fulfillment service. The automatic function can be enabled or disabled with the command line interface (CLI) using the command set hcs link auto-primecollab-linkage. The state of this function can be displayed using the command show hcs link auto-primecollab-linkage.

• Credentials have been added for the device in the Cisco HCM-F UI HCM-F Infrastructure Manager Administrative Interface. Credentials for the devices can be added in two ways:

  • You can define a set of default credentials for each device type (Hosted Collaboration Solution > Infrastructure Manager > Administration > Default Credentials). When a new device is synchronized from the Unified Communications Domain Manager through the CUCDMSync, the default credentials associated with that device type will be automatically assigned to the new device. This is the recommended method and works well if all devices have the same SNMP credentials.

  • You can assign credentials to specific devices after they are synchronized to the SDR. This can be done on the Cluster Application page (Hosted Collaboration Solution > Infrastructure Manager > Customer Management > Customer > Cluster > Cluster Application). This method should be used for devices that have different SNMP credentials from the defaults.

Cisco HCS Service Inventory is an application that provides reports for service providers for billing and audit purposes. These reports contain data on customers, subscribers, devices, and other details that are currently provisioned on Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager. In addition, Service Inventory can generate reports directly from Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection application servers for customers that are provisioned in Cisco HCM-F that do not have a Unified Communications Domain Manager configured. Service Inventory automatically transfers the report files daily to remote SFTP servers. The service providers use these reports to generate billing records for their customers.

Important

Currently, Service Inventory can generate reports from a Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection running UC Application Software Version 8.6 or later.

You can configure and schedule the report generation through the Service Inventory administrative interface. Through this interface, you can also manage credentials and configure general settings for Service Inventory.

At the time that is specified in the Service Inventory configuration, Service Inventory sends a real-time query request to Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager or the appropriate UC Application for information. Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager or the UC Application generates the necessary files and sends the files to Service Inventory through SFTP. Service Inventory creates a backup of the files, creates the report, and transfers the report to the SFTP servers that are configured in the Service Inventory administrative interface.

The generated report contains data for the previous 24 hours, up to and including the end time that you specify on the Overview page in the Service Inventory administrative interface. The generated reports get backed up for a configured amount of time. The default is 60 days.

On Demand reporting

Service Inventory provides On Demand Inventory and Location reporting. These On Demand reports allow the administrator to generate reports at any time without having to alter the reporting schedule. Location Summary reports generate a report to indicate the number of devices and subscribers per location.

Note	Location reports require an Inventory report to be available on the system or an error will be generated.

Three types of customer/reseller reports can also be generated, SI reports, Summary reports and MACD reports.

The reports use a Cisco common format. For more information on this format and the data that is generated, see the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Release 11.5 Maintain and Operate Guide.

For instructions on how to perform configuration and scheduling tasks through the Service Inventory administrative interface, see the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Release 11.5 Maintain and Operate Guide.

The Platform Manager is an installation, upgrade, restart and backup management client for the following Cisco Unified Communications applications:

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM and Presence Service

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager

• Cisco Unity Connection

The Platform Manager allows you to manage and monitor the installation, upgrade, restart and backup of these servers. You can access the Platform Manager through the Cisco HCM-F administrative interface.

The Platform Manager organizes servers into server groups. All of the servers in a server group can be upgraded, switched, and restarted at the same time. Server groups are user-defined and consist of servers from multiple clusters. All of the servers in a particular group, however, must have the same product. for example, you cannot mix Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM and Presence Service nodes in the same server group.

Server groups allow you to logically join together different servers on which you want to perform common tasks as a group, such as installation, upgrades, and restarts.

The Platform Manager allows you to configure the system server inventory as well as select, schedule, and monitor upgrades of one or more servers across one or more clusters.

The server inventory can also be automatically synchronized from the Shared Data Repository so that it does not have to be manually configured.

The Platform Manager offers a wide range of different user-defined servers types to accommodate the management of potentially thousands of servers.

After you have configured all of your servers and server groups within Platform Manager, you can create a variety of tasks that help you streamline any installation, upgrade, or restart process. You can also automate backup tasks of your system using the Backup Schedule feature.

For instructions on how to perform Platform Manager configuration tasks, see the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Mediation Fulfillment Install and Configure Guide, Release 11.5(1).

The Cisco HCM-F administrative interface is the user interface to the Cisco HCM-F services. It allows you to perform management and configuration tasks on the Cisco HCM-F services.

From any user PC in your network, you can browse into a server that is running the Cisco HCM-F administrative interface and log in with administrative privileges: https://your-HCM-F-server:<portnumber>.

The Cisco HCM-F administrative interface uses HTTPS to secure the communication between the browser and the web server.

The Cisco HCM-F administrative interface provides the following administrative interfaces:

• Service Inventory

• Infrastructure Manager

• Platform Manager

• HCS License Manager

The Cisco HCS North Bound Interface Web Service is a set of SOAP APIs that expose Cisco HCM-F functionality to the service provider OSS/BSS. These APIs provide the ability to configure, service, and control a Cisco HCM-F deployment.

The APIs comprise the following distinct categories:

• Shared Data Repository Web Service API

• Fulfillment Web Service API

• Service Inventory Web Service API

• HCS License Manager Web Service API

• UC Monitor Web Service API