Music on Hold SRND

I'm currently going through the best practices section regarding music on hold (MoH) using unicast, multicast, or both to stream audio media. This section also covers best practices depending on your network environment, such as competently centralized VoIP network, multi-site network with centralized call processing, our multi-site network with multiple clusters.

In my current work environment we currently use unicast for MoH and our environment has centralized call processing with multiple remote sites. We actually used to use multicast for MoH because it's obviously more efficient but we ran into a Cisco Call Manager bug with our previous version 7.x. We have since upgraded to 8.X but whatever TAC engineer we were working with recommended unicast over multicast when possible. Seems as if the SRND says otherwise, again for obvious reasons.

Cisco Unified CM and LDAP Connectivity

I spent the last few days reading the SRND chapter regarding CUCM and synching with LDAP. This is what we currently do in our environment since upgrading from 6.x to 8.x. Before we synchronized with our AD environment, it was a very manual and painful experience adding or changing user accounts in the phone system. Especially when we would provision new remote sites. It also makes administrating all of the different unified communication components alot easier since there is pretty much a single log in for all of our equipment. We even had security consultants come in and configure our ACS device to synch with AD so that we could log into all of network devices with our single Windows Account login, very efficient!

Inter Cluster Trunks (ICT)

I'm currently reading through the section regarding inter cluster trunks in the SRND guide. More specifically H.323 and SIP trunks between Unified CM Clusters. Nothing to detailed and pretty high level overview on recommendations regarding ICT's directly between clusters or using a Gatekeeper. I also went over high availability, load balancing, and the newer features that CUCM 8.x offers. I'm still drawing up what my CCNP: Voice lab is going to be or even if I decide to go for the cert still. VoIP is growing so fast and there's a multitude of different vendors out there, especially with SIP, it's hard to imagine spending 1k-3k for a very vendor specific certification. We'll see though

UPoE - Universal Power over Ethernet

I was able to listen in on a webcast regarding the new UPoE and I decided to take a few notes, I've written them below:

• UPoE is setup to currently provide up to 60W of power for many types of devices rather than just phones. We're talking about PC monitors, Thin Clients, even LED lights.

• Power over Ethernet has had the following time line so far

1. 7W of Inline Power beginning in 2000
2. 15W of PoE beginning  in 2003
3. 30W of PoE+ beginning in 2007
4. 60W of UPoE beginning in 2011

•  I didn't know this but RJ-45 is a universal socket, this is the only type of connecter that is used by the entire world.
• UPoE uses all 4 Ethernet wire pairs with 15W running through each pair for a total of 60W. It should be noted that data WILL work just fine using UPoE over the Ethernet cable.
• To determine safety with the new UPoE technology. A test was conducted using a bundle of 100 cables with maximum UPoE power sent through them. They were able to determine that there are no dangers of handling this additional wattage over the Ethernet cable. Also the heating temperature only increased by 10 degrees when comparing the 15W bundle with the 60W bundle.
• CDP is used by Cisco devices for power negotiation while non-Cisco devices use LLDP

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Cisco Briefing Bytes - New Cisco 4500 Life Cycle

This morning I was able to attend a small conference regarding the future for the Cisco 4500 platform along with the present. The 4500 series currently comes in 3 flavors, small (4503), medium (4507), and big (4510). Below I'll highlight briefly what I've learned and what I thought of the presentation.

Presentation:
The presentation was in a small conference room at my local Cisco office featuring models of all the latest and greatest offerings from the Unified Communications world. Our presenter was very knowledgeable, it was only me and two other guys who attended but the questions we shot to him he was able to handle with out skipping a beat. The presentation was the perfect amount of length for the product, 30-45 minutes long with Q&A time.

4500 New Features:
There are a ton of new features but I'll quickly list what caught my attention below:

• Software WLAN Controller using a Supervisor Slot
• Supervisors now use Dual Core CPU's
• Internal VRF's (Allows multiple independent routing tables to be created) up to 64
• Energywise Power Management
• UPoE (Universal PoE) 60 Watts per port to power not only phones but also other network, computer equipment that are becoming PoE enabled such as monitors, Thin Clients, etc

Software:
4500 will use the new IOS-XE for its operating system, it sits on top of a Linux Kernel which allows it to take advantage of the dual core CPU and allows separate software to be run. WireShark comes installed by default and allows packet capture for not only the Control Plane but for also the Data. Also new to the new chassis and supervisors is the VSS (Virtual Switching System) that behaves very similar to HSRP on routers in which there's one IP to manage multiple switches in an active active state. the endpoint isn't aware that there are 2 or more physical switches and only sees it as one; this allows for  very High Availability.

Current Capabilities:
The presenter went over things the current 4500 chassis can do, in our case we use 1 WS-4510-E. There's a feature called ISSU that allows upgrades on the Supervisors without having to physically reload the chassis or Sup which causes downtime. Something else I had no idea about is what's called EEM which is a built in editor that seems to be pretty feature rich. There's even a GUI that can be used for the editor.

Licensing:
Like everything else that's moving to the new version 15 IOS, the new IOS has every feature set installed but you're unable to use them until you license them.  By default the 4500 IOS comes with LAN Base but in order to enable IP services you'll have to purchase a license to turn on the IP Base features.

The New CCNP: Voice Certification is Expensive...For Me

Now that I'm preparing to deep dive into the CCNP: Voice track, I'm in the very early stages of figuring out what hardware, software, etc I'll need to get through the entire exam. At the very minimum I'll need to cough up at least $2,000-3,000 dollars I think. Sadly when I put together my CCNA: Voice lab before the new update I used all equipment that isn't compatible with the new version 8.x that Cisco is currently on. I have a few 1760 routers and possibly even some VWIC's and some other stuff that I might not be able to reuse. I should of done better research of the long term and what will be needed.

Oh well lesson learned, I'm going to either borrow equipment from work or purchase a few 2801's and a beefy PC to through all the Cisco Software on in a VM environment. I need a new PC any ways, it's about 4-5 years old lol. I can obtain IP phones for both Type-A and Type-B easily, my work laptop for Presence testing and other random things. I'll need to buy some cheap analog phones which is simple and other random things. I'm going to go off of this good diagram which is a HQ, one branch, and a PSTN router for external calls. If absolutely needed I'll buy equipment to make a 2nd branch office. Hopefully this will get me through everything. I'm estimating about 18 months of study time give or take. Cisco changes certification requirements so much that if I'm going to tackle this I need to start now rather than later. It would suck to get 3/4 through the CCNP: Voice and have to start over due to an update to the track.