Meetingplace 8.5 Scheduling, Call recording

I've done a previous port about Cisco Meetingplace 8.5 Licensing which lists a couple of different types of servers, here's the link for reference:
http://twhittle1.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/meetingplace-85-licensing.html

But I've got a number of extra bits of information I want to get down so here is a follow up.

A web scheduling server is used to schedule meetings / calls through outlook or through a web interface. If this functionality is not required and only phone scheduling is needed then the web scheduler server isn't needed. A gotcha here is recordings, despite being a scheduler server it is required for recording meetings. 

With regards to the recordings, the Application (A/V) Server can store up to 1000 hours of audio recording or 160 hours of video recordings, and is limited to 100 simultaneous meetings being recorded.  Also note that each recording will consume an audio port so this will effect overall system capacity.

Cisco Unified MeetingPlace audio and video meeting recordings are initially stored only on the Application Server. Shortly after each recorded meeting ends, the Replication Service copies the meeting recording from the Application Server to the Web Server, where the recording is converted and stored for user playback.

Every day at 2 a.m. (local server time), the system deletes all recordings on the Application Server that are older than 24 hours. To display the available disk space for recordings (/mpx-record directory) on the Application Server, sign in to the CLI and enter df -k.

By default, the Web Server stores all recordings for meetings held on the server on a local disk. You can change the storage configuration to copy these items to an external backup location (such as a shared network drive on a dedicated storage server, a network-attached storage device, or a storage area network).  If the customer will have a large number of recordings, or would like to keep recordings for an extended period of time, using external storage will be needed.

If you want to record calls then the Web Server is practically mandatory. Using CUCM to initiate the recordings is definitely not a recommended option.  First of all, CUCM can initiate call recording but it doesn't "do" the call recording.  You would still need to add a 3rd party recording application.  Also, recording in CUCM pre-9.0 is not done on-demand, it is done via admin config or CTI invocation (MP is not CTI), and would turn on recording for all phones.  This means that all calls would be recorded, so you would have "x" number of copies of that meeting where "x" is the number of meeting attendees.  

Also, regardless of whether or not you have a version of CUCM that supports on-demand recording, there wouldn't be a good way of differentiating the calls that are an MP meeting from just normal calls in the recording database, so it would be difficult to manage and retrieve the recordings.  All calls would just look like a phone call that "phone x" made at this date/time, so you'd have to know which exact calls are an MP meeting.