The power of engagement: Cisco® Digital Signage is a platform for interactive media experiences. Now you can easily deliver and manage applications to communicate, connect, and engage. Imagine delivering compelling and interactive media to any store, bank, manufacturing floor, or hospital to engage customers and employees in a whole new way.
The scalable, network-based Cisco Digital Signage platform consists of management software, digital media players, interactive thin clients, and displays. On top of this, Cisco’s diverse partner ecosystem customizes your deployment to your needs. This gives you new opportunities to create a consistent user experience across multiple channels, increase revenue, and maximize operational efficiency.
Cisco DMM 5.4 Virtual Machine
The Cisco Digital Media Manager is a web-based media management application that allows you to easily manage, schedule, and publish digital media through the web to the desktop and to digital signage displays. This particular release of the DMM 5.4 software provides network administrators the option to run the application virtually on a VMware vSphere hypervisor (ESXi) system. (See Figure 1.)
Note: The Cisco DMM 5.4 virtual machine software is a minor release that offers the flexibility of deploying or migrating the Digital Media Manager to a VMware ESXi environment. There are no new features, enhancements, or defects resolved through this release that are not already available in the appliance-based release of Cisco DMM 5.4. For more information regarding the new features introduced in Cisco Digital Media Suite 5.4, consult the Cisco Digital Signs 5.4 data sheet.
Primary Features and Benefits
The primary benefits of deploying the Digital Media Manager as a virtual machine on an ESXi host are similar to those gained with most typical virtual deployments. Improvements across the board and increased performance can be achieved in the areas of scalability, security, firewall restrictions, redundancy, storage, and overall ease of management. A decrease in overall footprint in the data center also brings along lower electrical consumption and increase in energy efficiency.
Figure 2 depicts a scenario in which the Cisco Digital Media Managers are deployed as virtual machines on ESXi servers in active/standby mode to support high availability (note that in the failover configuration, both nodes must be running as virtual machine instances). Administrators as well as end users are securely authenticated in this federation mode against a SAML 2.0–compliant single sign-on (SSO) provider. The Cisco Digital Media Players are connected across the IP network to the Digital Media Manager, which serves to communicate and serve up both live and on-demand streaming digital media in a variety of encoding formats.
Existing Cisco Digital Media Suite (version 5.4) deployments, including high-availability configurations, that are currently operating on the appliance-based model may also choose to migrate in order to take advantage of the various benefits gained in a virtualized model. The appliance-to-VM migration is accomplished through the standard backup and restore procedures that come available out of the box with any Cisco DMM appliance.
Product Specifications
Table 1 gives the minimum hardware resource specifications for an ESXi-based host. Table 2 provides the host system software and license requirements.
Table 1. Host System Hardware Requirements
Item |
Minimum Hardware Specification |
Central processing unit (CPU) |
64-bit (x86) 2.0 GHz quad-core processor |
Memory (RAM) |
16 GB |
Storage (HDD) |
2 TB |
Network (NIC) |
Two 1-Gbps (10/100/1000) connections |
BIOS |
Virtualization enabled |
Table 2. Host System Software and Licensing Requirements
Item |
Requirement |
VMware vSphere hypervisor ESXi |
Release 5.0, Update 1 |
vSphere or vCenter software |
Release 5.0 |
vSphere or vCenter licensing |
Enterprise software licensing |
Ordering Information
Table 3 provides orderability and migration information for the Cisco Digital Media Manager virtual machine.
Table 3. Software Orderability and Migration
Product Name |
Part Number |
Digital Media Manager, Virtual Image, v5.4, SW |
R-DMMVM-BASE-54-K9 |
Digital Media Manager, Virtual Image, Migration v5.4, SW |
R-DMMVM-MIGR54-K9 |
Digital Media Manager Failover SW, Virtual Image, v5.4, SW |
R-DMMVM-FASW-54-K9 |
Service and Support
Cisco and our partners provide a broad portfolio of smart, personalized services and support that can help you realize the full value of your video investment and increase business agility and network availability. This portfolioof services promotes business transformation through a network-based collaboration platform that enablesbusiness to collaborate anywhere, anytime. For more information about these services, visit www.cisco.com/go/services/digitalmedia.
For More Information
For more information about Cisco Digital Signage, visit www.cisco.com/go/dms or contact your local Ciscoaccountrepresentative.