Configuring a Media Appliance

A Vocera Media appliance is an optional dedicated server for media storage. This document describes how to configure the Vocera Media appliance for customer use.

While the media metadata, Vocera Media Adapter, and Vocera XMPP Adapter are located on the Vocera Platform appliance, a separate appliance (Vocera's Media appliance) or an enterprise file storage setup is needed to manage the file storage capacity associated with the customer's media useage. Larger enterprises may rely upon usage of their own network for storage, while smaller customers may choose to use the dedicated Media appliance to store media.

The Media appliance runs the Samba service to host an SMB/CIFS file storage server to store media objects over the network. The Samba service supports up to the 3.0 SMB protocol and the Media appliance allows for the ability to receive software updates both from Vocera Platform and Redhat. The Media appliance system can be monitored via SNMP to provide information such as CPU load and disk usage. In addition, the SNMP service will send messages via SNMP whenever the disk storage is above 90% or the CPU load is above 2.

Media Appliance Resource Specifications

The following table of information describes the Media appliance resource needs for small, medium, and large facilities. The VM disk size can be increased at any point in time via the LVM disk management service.

For enterprise VM resource specifications, please see the Virtual Machine Installation documentation in the Vocera Platform Installation Guide.

Small (200 Beds or Less)

Resource Value
CPU 1 Core
RAM 2GBytes
Disk 10GBytes

Medium (200 to 500 Beds)

Resource Value
CPU 1 Core
RAM 2GBytes
Disk 25GBytes

Large (500 Beds or Larger)

Resource Value
CPU 1 Core
RAM 2GBytes
Disk 60GBytes

Media Appliance Sizing Calculation

The following information is provided to calculate capacity for the Media appliance's database or estimated storage requirements for the fileshare. Generally speaking, photo data is stored on the Media appliance for 72 hours (three days). Assuming on average, a location may capture and store two photos per day. It should also be noted that Vocera Platform compresses any photos regardless of the native file size of a phone's camera.

Step Process Calculation
1. Count the average number of photos per day at approximately 500k per photo Assume 2 photos per day = 1 MB
2. Count the number of locations that alerts are delivered to Assume locations = Beds + Tele-pack locations + Other = 1000
3. Determine how long data will stay on the primary appliance Assume 72 hours (3 days) worth of data
Total Photo size * Number of Locations * Number of days of Storage 3 GB

SMB Share Information

The Samba SMB Service is configured via the /etc/samba/smb.conf file and hosts an SMB share named 'media-share' which has read/write access for the 'extension' SMB user in the EXTENSIONWORKGROUP workgroup. The share is physically located at '/opt/media-share'.

SMB Setting Value
Host extension-media-appliance, IP address, or other DNS (to be provided by customer)
Share media-share
Workgroup EXTENSIONWORKGROUP
SMB User extension

Account Information

The Media appliance provides three system accounts. Contact Vocera Professional Services for passwords.

Login Default Password Purpose Provides
tpx-admin N/A Vocera Support/Upgrade Provided for access to the BASH command line and SUDO administration privileges for full administrative control of the server.
administrator Forced change on first login Media Appliance Configuration Provided to share with the customer so they can configure the Media appliance server settings. Automatically launches the configuration menu; the session will end upon exiting the menu, and the user is returned to the main login prompt. User cannot access the BASH prompt or access any functions outside of those defined in the configuration menu.
extension Configured by administrator SMB User Account Provided for read and write access to the share 'media-share'. The password can be set by the administrator user at any point in time.