Patent ID: 7761876

Claim:
A method executed by a controller for balancing a load on a plurality of software-based media processors executing on a plurality of appliances, each one of the plurality of software-based media processors executing on one of the plurality of appliances, the load balancing based upon a CPU utilization information for the plurality of appliances, comprising: establishing a communication channel with each one of the plurality of software-based media processors; requesting said CPU utilization information of each appliance of said plurality of appliances, said requesting of said CPU utilization information occurs upon receipt of an additional processing task by said controller and said requesting of said CPU utilization information is repeated according to a periodic basis after receipt of said additional processing task, said additional processing task being a new conference inquiry; retrieving a CPU utilization information for each appliance of the plurality of appliances, wherein the CPU utilization information includes a processing speed of each appliance, a number of media channels currently supported by each software-based media processor, a number of conferences being supported by each software-based media processor across a conferencing system and a quantity of processing tasks currently supported by each appliance of said plurality of appliances other than processing tasks related to the software-based media processor executing on the appliance; assigning said additional processing task to a software-based media processor of said plurality of software-based media processors based upon said CPU utilization information for each appliance, and said assigning of said additional processing task includes determining an amount of processing resources necessary to execute said additional processing task; and receiving an alert when the software-based media processor of said plurality of software-based media processors is incapable of handling another processing task.