Enhanced high-availability for VQ Conference Manager 

Upgrades cut failover time to under 60 seconds, simplify operation, and reduce overall cost.

Customers around the world use VQ Conference Manager to underpin mission-critical collaboration on their Cisco Meeting Server platforms. The importance of these meetings means high-availability (HA) of the management software is a non-negotiable for many customers.  

Our original HA implementation of VQ Conference Manager has been incredibly popular. But our customers told us they wanted more. Such is the importance of their conferencing services that a recovery time of minutes isn’t always sufficient: they need sub-60 seconds. So this is what we’re now providing. 

And not only that: our new HA is simpler to deploy and operate – and more cost-effective.

Simplifying HA for VQ Conference Manager

VQ Conference Manager’s enhanced HA reduces complexity by aligning with customers’ existing network features. Most organizations who operate multiple data centers will already have server load-balancing capabilities; VQ Conference Manager now makes use of these, instead of requiring its own load balancers. 

This simplifies your overall IT architecture, reducing capital costs and operational overheads. 

Failover times reduced to sub-60 seconds 

The other big advantage of our upgraded HA is the recovery time. Previously, VQ Conference Manager HA was active-standby. This met the original recovery time objective (RTO) of sub-10 minutes, though in reality most customers are back up and running in less than five. 

As of version 4.8, VQ Conference Manager HA will be active-passive, with two or three nodes. This slashes those recovery times down to sub-60 seconds, giving you even greater assurance around the availability of your conferencing service. 

Growing the value of your conferencing service 

This increased resilience further increases the breadth of scenarios in which VQ Conference Manager can be used. Those who will particularly benefit include organizations using their Cisco Meeting Server platform for mission-critical conferencing, including incident response.  

The upgraded HA is one of many capabilities we continue to develop in response to customer feedback – head to our what’s new in version 4.8 blog for the full run-down of what’s in the latest release. 

And if you’d like to know more about the new HA capability, book a call with our sales team, or speak to your VQ Communications customer success manager.