One of the best features of the DM NVX® AV-over-IP line of products is its scalability. But the more endpoints you’ve got, the more complicated managing those endpoints can become. Having an individual web UI for every device can be incredibly laborious and time-consuming.

That’s why we offer the DM NVX Director® Virtual Switching Appliance, our purpose-built tool for network-wide deployment of DM NVX AV-over-IP devices at scale — with a single piece of hardware and through a single screen. It’s available in three versions, making it easy to choose the right solution for your installation.

An enterprise or campus may have 50, hundreds, or even thousands of endpoints, all highlighting the need for easy management from a single device. That's where this appliance comes in: It’s a single point of connectivity to the DM NVX ecosystem. (While this solution is typically recommended for systems with more than 20 endpoints, it can be used for any DM NVX installation.)

The DM NVX Director® Virtual Switching Appliance can also work with a Crestron control system as an aggregator: You can route all your control traffic to the right DM NVX endpoints. It also offers convenient user interface features; you can logically group your DM NVX endpoints in a way that makes sense for a particular installation, whether that’s certain rooms, floors, or campus-wide.

“There are three key things that we keep top of mind: ease of deployment, ease of control, and ease of management,” says Kevin Dry, a group product manager for AV solutions at Crestron.

Deploy

“From a deployment standpoint, the idea here is to streamline the process — at scale,” says Dry. “You’ll have a single dashboard that gives you the ability to see all your endpoints and their key settings. What you may have had to do programmatically or through the web user interface by accessing every single device, you can now do in a single view.”

The appliance also gives you the ability to group endpoints by domains. “It’s a simple process to drag and drop, reorder, and remove endpoints,” says Dry. “If you need to configure the system before you have access to all the physical devices, you can add a placeholder,” he adds.

“If the director and the DM NVX devices are on the same network subnet, you can auto-discover, allowing you to find or replace units quickly.”

Manage

“Understanding the state of the system is incredibly important to installers and IT departments, and that's what DM NVX Director facilitates,” says Dry. “It’s vital to managing systems and being able to troubleshoot in real time.” If a particular route isn’t set correctly, for example, you have that status at your fingertips. “When you’re building a system with dozens, hundreds, or even 1,000 endpoints, it’s imperative that you find a solution that will help visualize the total system.”

“The appliance gives you an endpoint map that visualizes your inputs and outputs and helps you understand which sources are going to which destinations. It also has the real-time status of every network interface and endpoint,” says Dry. “You have the ability to troubleshoot and proactively respond, the ability to quickly replace endpoints if required, and then roll out new firmware releases with ease.”

“Ultimately, it’s a powerful solution that gives you real-time status of every network interface and every endpoint in order to monitor and manage your systems for greater efficiency.”