Solved V18 Web Meeting Traffic

[NicoC]

Hi All, I was hoping someone might be able to shed some light. With the new v18 server the web meeting URL is no longer servername.3cx.net and is now our own FQDN. Does this mean that the full video processing is being handled by our on-premise server or is it just a change to the URL that has changed?

We have a pretty locked down network and are just beginning our testing after upgrading to V18 RC2 and have noticed that the web meeting is trying to go off to wmr-cdn.3cx.net and as010-syd.3cx.net, and wanted to know what the behaviour was for this action. My understanding was that the web meeting has been moved to the 3cx server rather than the 3CX.net servers but i may have misunderstood what was happening in v18

Thanks

 

[Evolute IT]

The portal is now hosted on the PBX itself but the MCU (media servers) are still hosted by 3CX. In the settings > infos, if you scroll at the bottom you'll see which MCU the meeting is running on.

 

[NickD_3CX]

Hi @NicoC ,

As @Frederick Marcoux said, starting from V18, the Portal Server, which holds the meeting information, runs on your 3CX Server.

The Media processing though, at the time of writing this, is not done on-prem (this might be an option in the future), so your 3CX Server needs to inform the MCUs of new meetings, what participants will be joining, etc.

Because though are WebMeeting service is scalable, we constantly add/remove/upgrade MCU servers, so in order for each 3CX Server to know what MCUs exist, they first contact the WMR server that is always updated with the full list of MCUs and allocates which MCU to be used depending on load, latency, geographical location, etc.

I hope this explains a bit better the outgoing traffic you see.

 

[NicoC]

Thank you for the clarification regarding the web meeting portal and the MCU. I remember that there was talk about the MCU coming on-premise so I guess I assumed that is what was happening with v18. Is there still a plan to bring the MCU into your own server so that the traffic is not running over a public cloud provider?

 

[NickD_3CX]

Thank you for the clarification regarding the web meeting portal and the MCU. I remember that there was talk about the MCU coming on-premise so I guess I assumed that is what was happening with v18. Is there still a plan to bring the MCU into your own server so that the traffic is not running over a public cloud provider?

It is on our roadmap to do this at some point, most likely within the lifetime of 3CX V18, I couldn't give you though an exact time frame.

 

[NicoC]

Thanks for the clarification Nick, it is definitely a feature we would love to see. We look after a few government clients that need to work to the PROTECTED level and are very risk-averse to using public VC solutions. Having the MCU on their own infrastructure would be a huge selling point for that industry. I look forward to seeing it in the future.

 

[LeonidasG_3CX]

Thanks for the clarification Nick, it is definitely a feature we would love to see. We look after a few government clients that need to work to the PROTECTED level and are very risk-averse to using public VC solutions. Having the MCU on their own infrastructure would be a huge selling point for that industry. I look forward to seeing it in the future.

We're very aware of of the need for privately hosted / on-premise solution in regards to the MCU. Our first step in V18 was to move the portal away from our own servers and into the PBX and now that this is complete, we're moving onto the next phases of our project.

The next phase will include a video conferencing API and on-premise & possibly private/personal cloud MCUs. The how, who, where is something we're currently considering.

We hope to be able to provide these features sometime during the second major V18 PBX release albeit the target release version and date are fluid for the moment.