What you need to know about Sametime 8.5
Filed under: Sametime, Technology
Sametime 8.5 marks a major turning point in the product platform from IBM Lotus Domino to the IBM Websphere and DB2 infrastructure. As you plan out your environment, there are a couple key points to consider:
- Sametime Classic – Most of the promotional materials and discussions which have occurred over the past two years have shown screenshots of the new Sametime 8.5 meetings experience built on IBM WebSphere technology. If you are not ready to make the jump, the older version of the Sametime Meeting server is still available. This version is now referred to as Sametime Classic and contains both the Sametime Community and Meeting server. The Sametime Classic Meeting server has not undergone any major enhancements, however does contain bug fixes. Companies running Sametime Classic on AIX, Linux and Solaris will see major improvements in the stability of the Meeting Room client when application sharing.
- What type of directory should you use? – If you want to utilize many of the new features in Sametime 8.5, you will need to use an LDAP directory. If you’re still using a Domino Directory, you will need to enable LDAP on a server not used for Sametime and connect the Sametime 8.5 infrastructure to it. Sametime 8.5 is heavily based on WebSphere technology which connects to LDAP, but not native Domino. The Sametime 8.5 environment will support most LDAP v3 complaint servers, however if anyone out there is running Microsoft Active Directory 2008 Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) you’re out of luck with this release.
- IBM Domino Server version - The Sametime 8.5 Classic and Community server can be installed on Domino 8.0.x and 8.5 only. There is no support for Domino 8.5.1 at this time but IBM is working on supporting this in the next releases
- What type of Load Balancing device to use? – Historically, the Sametime Mux, IP Sprayer or a round-robin DNS could be use to distribute traffic to a Sametime server. These options are still available for a Sametime Classic or community only server, however not all of these solutions are valid for the newer components such as meetings, proxy and media manager. These other components need to use either a load balancer or a WebSphere proxy. A Sametime MUX can not be used with these new components. Sametime 8.5 does include the WebSphere Edge components as part of the eAssembly package which is a great easy to setup load balancer once you get the hang of it. It can be installed on a single machine and serve multiple host addresses. The WebSphere proxy is a component on the WebSphere Application Server. In testing the software, there were a few issues that cropped up around WebSphere proxy testing with the Sametime Proxy component so it can not be used in those scenarios yet. Overall, it is always better to install a dedicated load balancer that performs IP-spraying in lieu of a round-robin DNS or using the WebSphere proxy server.
Posted on December 29th, 2009 by Andy Yiu
8 Comments
December 29th, 2009 at 9:01 am
I have St85 running on domino 851 on a few boxes, just like having st802 running on 851. Unsupported of course but since when did that stop progress.
December 29th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Andy I specifically asked about this “If you’re still using a Domino Directory, you will need to enable LDAP on a server not used for Sametime and connect the Sametime 8.5 infrastructure to it.”
during the beta, and they assured me this was no longer the case in 8.5. In the beta forum see Joel Abbott’s post on 11/03/2009.
December 29th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Carl, you are correct in that technically you can connect the 8.5 infrastructure to an LDAP server hosted on the Sametime server. One of the limitations has been removed with 8.5, that being the problem of authenticating to the meeting server with a set of credentials encoded with the wrong user id. However, the support stance on this still remains the same as LTPA tokens are quite sensitive to the format of data encoded within the token. In the past, we have seen a slew of PMRs arrive where the Domino hierarchial name was encoded instead of the cannotical name which caused validation on other components to fail. The solution to this was to run the LDAP task on a different server, reconfigure the Sameitme server to use the other server and finally use selective relication on the NAB to remove the person/group documents from the Sametime server’s NAB.
So in summary, if you’re only using Sametime with the new meetings architecture, there shouldn’t be a problem using this. However once you start building it into other solution and first authenticate against the Sametime server, that is when you can potentially start to see problems.
December 29th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Thanks Andy, so really for a minimum of everything install, you need three servers, would that be correct (unless you’re using VMware obviously)?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
That’s right, or you’re using a third party LDAP server. It’s a pretty heavy load but well worth it for the new meetings and web client experience.
December 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Thanks for being the loyal IBMer Andy, the new meetings are great, if everyone lives in the same network.
As I said in the beta forum, IBM has trebled my monthly hosting costs for just running Sametime. For a small business, that’s a big additional expense, with questionable results when video doesn’t yet work with NAT firewalls, web clients can’t allow control of their machines etc.
December 29th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Thanks for the post Andy! I didn’t realize Domino 8.5.1 was not supported for the Sametime 8.5 community server!
Carl….as you have stated several times, I can see tons of SMB customers moving to WebEx, Dim Dim, Lotus Live, etc., for meeting solutions for internal and external meetings. The cost and knowledge will be expensive!
- Tim E. Brown
December 29th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
I have used Sametime Unyte for screen sharing for quite a while despite the fact that my company provides a Sametime meeting server and has WebEx. I agree with Tim that cloud based solutions are an alternative that the smaller businesses are seriously considering. When IBM continues to build solutions on the WAS+DB2+IHS platform, it is increasingly difficult for a true small business to embrace a solution with that many moving parts.