What is Zoom Mesh

Zoom Mesh is a native, zero-click, and zero-install client-based Mesh (eCDN) solution for Zoom Meetings, Webinars and Events. The Zoom Mesh service minimizes network congestion for Webinars & Events while preserving the native Zoom attendee and host experience. Overall with Zoom Mesh, customers can take advantage of:

This article cover:

Prerequisites for using Zoom Mesh

Note: Zoom Mesh supports the VDI plugin versions 5.14.0 or higher.

What is Zoom Mesh?

When multiple attendees and participants are connected to a Meeting or Webinar from the same local network, this can put an unnecessary strain on the network due to the requirements for the incoming bandwidth to handle the media streams from the Zoom Cloud to each meeting participant or webinar attendee. Zoom Mesh lowers this bandwidth using a number of clients to route media from the Zoom Cloud to the rest of the attendees within the network.

This is achieved via the service designating a number of Zoom Clients connected to a session as Mesh Parents. The parent clients send and receive media from the Zoom Cloud and distribute incoming streams to the other Zoom Clients (designated as Mesh Children) connected to the session within the same local network as the Parents.

 

Features of Zoom Mesh

Zoom Mesh features include:

Zoom Mesh architecture

Normal Zoom Meetings, Webinar, and Events architecture

In the normal Zoom Meeting, Webinar, or Event experience, all participants joining from the same local network receive individual but identical streams from the host. If the participants are mostly working in the office, this can cause a large strain or even overwhelm an organization's WAN or internet connection, especially if the Host and attendees are in different offices or branches. To accommodate the bandwidth necessary to handle the streams, an organization would need to ensure the WAN or internet bandwidth is provisioned based on the potential maximum attendees in each branch or office in the organization.

Zoom Mesh architecture

With the Zoom Mesh architecture, only Zoom Clients designated by the Mesh service receive the stream from the Zoom Cloud. These designated hosts forward the media stream to the rest of the attendees within their LAN, greatly reducing the WAN or internet bandwidth necessary to stream to all attendees. 

For information on the network requirements for Zoom Mesh, please see the firewall rules for Zoom Mesh.

Zoom Mesh survivability

An important part of the Zoom Mesh is the survivability component. During a session, if a Mesh parent ends up losing connectivity, its children as well as the sublayer parents will automatically be distributed amongst the other active parents.

In the event that all Mesh parents are down, and there are no other clients that meet the requirements to be a parent, then all attendees will connect directly to the Zoom Cloud for the media streams.

VPN considerations

When utilizing VPN with Zoom Mesh, there are special considerations for VPN routing: