Setting up the CCNP Voice Lab Progess

My first day in of fully committing to the CCNP Voice certification is off to a great start. I'm building my home CCNP: Voice lab based on a modified version of Kevin Wallace's Voice lab design. The modified version is pictured above, I may add an extra switch for the branch site and an extra IP phone if needed; I also may add an extra branch site. I still need the following to complete the home lab and then I'll snap a few pictures of my final design for this certification:

• 1 T1 cross over cable (PSTN router to branch office router)
• 3 Cisco IP Phones (Maybe 4 if I decide to borrow an additional switch)
• 1 IP Phone Power Brick (There's no PoE on the Cisco 28XX Gig ports)
• 2  Seven foot long Ethernet cables (For the HQ IP Phones)
• 1 Analog Phone (Hoping I can borrow this from someone)

I spent an hour or so setting up the physical equipment, cables, and basic network configuration. The longest part was provisioning the T1 controllers for the pseudo PSTN network using PRI connections. The HQ router didn't even see the VWIC card it had to configure it. After a quick Google search it jogged my memory of the card-type command and specifying if it was going to be a T1 or E1 controller. I'm surprised that I was able to configure the PRI ports all from memory, very good start to this long journey ahead.

I also went ahead and started my Safari Book subscription once again and read the pre-face for the new CCNP CVoice book by Kevin Wallace. I'm so glad that there's FINALLY material to study for this certification. I upgraded both Cisco 2821 routers to IOS 15.x already and I've downloaded a few different CME 8.x versions and a COP file for CUCM 8.0 for the later tracks. I'll proabably wait until around chapter 3 in the CVoice book to actually start installing and configuring CME but we'll see how impatient and anxious I get before hand.

I'm going to use the following web link: http://blog.ine.com/2009/01/18/configuring-a-pstn-dialplan/ for a general idea on setting up the PSTN router. I'm pretty sure that the Cisco 1760 that I'm using will be more than efficient for this job.What's going to make it or break it for me through this certification will be how much I can stick to a study plan, consistency is going to be the key I think. I'm wanting to get 16 hours in a week of study time. Two hours on the weekdays and Three hours on the weekends, I'm going to use a timer to keep me on task and of course lots and lots of Coffee!

1ExamAMonth and More Studying

I went through about 25 pages on additional Presence design along with viewing a few CCNP: Voice videos regarding basic dial peer configuration on 1examamonth.com. It was all just review really from CCNA:Voice material, I'll keep going through the free videos on the website and I may purchase or see if my company can purchase the full training videos. I'm also looking at the IPExpert training videos but they're twice as expensive.

CUPS (Presence)

I went over about 30 pages in the SRND Guide regarding presence and best design practices. I have a little over 250 pages to go until I move onto the actual certification books and start digging in into my home lab setup. I should be getting the second 2821 put together later this afternoon and I think I should be all set. I'll borrow a few Cisco IP Phones from work and maybe buy a cheap analog phone from the Goodwill or something. MY 1760's have a FXS/FXO cards already so I can always shuffle them around where needed.

Thousand Pages Read, 300 More Until GO Time!

I finally crossed the 1,000 page mark in the CUCM 8 SRND guide (1356 pages total). I spent the last few days covering Unity and the design recommendations associated with it. As I near the end of the guide, I'm starting to finally acquire the hardware and plan out the materials I need for the CCNP: Voice. My company is letting me borrow two 2800 series routers loaded up with all the PVDM's and VWIC's I would ever need. I might need to buy another FXO/FXS card though.

I plan on using one Cisco 2821 (pictured above)  as a Voice Gateway for the HQ and the other for the branch site. I'm going to use one of the 1760's as the PSTN network hopefully, and maybe the other for a 3rd branch site. I'm thinking I can get through CVoice cert without the dedicated ESXi server loaded up with CUCM, Unity, Presence, and maybe UCCX. It seems that CVoice focuses more on the gateway's and CME (Call Manager Express).

I would love to hear any suggestions or recommendations about this lab setup, it's hard to find other people going for the new updated cert since there's not a lot of material for it like the CCNP: R&S.

CUBAC

 I studied up on CUBAC which is short for Cisco Unified Business Attendant Console is an application designed specifically for receptionist to answer and dispatch calls. This requires a standalone server for the application itself and then integration with CUCM using CTI, AXL API and the Cisco TSP driver for call control. We currently use this in my work environment, when it works it's flawless but it likes to flake out every once awhile. 9 times out of 10 when there's issue with the program, simply logging the receptionist completely off attendant console and back on resolves whatever issue there is.

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!