Passing the CCIE Collaboration Lab was really hard and a very nice and entertaining experience, which I feel very happy to say that I completed the challenge!!
I will be very short on this post and will make it technical and a bit emotional for the people out there that may benefit from it at all
How many times is enough? Well I started this year thinking that it was going to take as many times as it needed to take… Financially this could be brutal and indeed it is. But the reality is that you need to make everything possible to make it happen. Just make sure you will get it, no matter what! and put every effort possible to achieve the goal.
This one may seem a bit like a very involved configuration but in reality is not. The process is easy, if you know how to set up AnyConnect in an ASA, you will be able to crack it.
I have also included few links that show the process and the important things that you need to consider, as well as licensing requirements
Useful Links: ASA Sample Configuration: (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/security/8_5_1/secugd/sec-851-cm/secuvpn.html#wp1054676)
Configure AnyConnect VPN IP Phones with Certificate Authentication on an ASA (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/unified-communications/unified-communications-manager-callmanager/115785-anyconnect-vpn-00.html)
Yes, another upgrade and more with it. This one was very special and I was totally blaming myself after the TAC engineer helped me figure it out.
I was always told, or I remember it was good practice to always get the latest Upgrade file from CCO Downloads page for everything. Well I did that and found myself into an issue.
The scenario:
Customer Upgrading CUCM, CUC and IM&P servers from 9.1.2 to Version 10.5 (No issue here):
So with the introduction of Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment, now upgrade any of your UC applications its easier and quicker than before. One of the big advantages that I see with this new product is that the product can have control of the overall infrastructure, starting from VMware all the way to the UC applications.
For a better understanding of this product you can use the following link: (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/pcdadmin/10_0_1/CUCM_BK_U9C58CB1_00_pcd-administration-guide-1001.html) - The previous is the one for version 10.x – I don’t see too many changes from version to version.
This one was a very funny one and I’d like to share with you. After an install of a remote office using the following equipment:
CIsco 2901 with an ISM for CUE and an AutoAttendant that when the office is open sends the call to a Hunt Group in CUCM and when they are close the **AA (**prompts) really kicks in. Nothing too crazy right?
After 1 month of the installation received a call that when someone calls the main number they hear not ring back (only death air) until someone answers the call. After this one I had few things to look at but I knew this was a cosmetic issue.
Just for curiosity, I would like to know how is the people on this group preparing for the CCIE Collaboraiton Lab, right now here is my preparation and roadmap:
I have completed a lab in order to be able to study most of the technologies included in the blueprint, here is what I have:
3 Cisco 2811 64 PVDM2 1 Cisco 2821 128 PVDM2 1 Cisco 3750G 24 Port 1 Poweredge 1950 III 32GB - 2 TB HD - 2 XeonQuadCore E5240 2.4Ghz 5 Cisco 7961 2 Cisco 7965
Hi there, today I have a customer that wanted to upgrade from CUCM 9.1.2 to 10.5 - which sounds pretty easy… think again, so this is a BE6K deployment where CUCM instance was configured with the recommended OVA from CCO. When starting the upgrade I found that the upgrade didn’t wanted to proceed as expected. and I was getting the following error:
Installation of UCSInstall_UCOS_10.5.1.10000-7.sgn.iso failed
An error has occured but no messages are available. This can happen when another administrator is working on the system at the same time and triggers an error.
Hi people, I wanted to take this opportunity and share my toolbox and workflow with you. In case you don’t know who I am and what I do here is a quick reference note.
What I do and who I am:
I’m a Lead Technical consultant specialized in Cisco Unified Communications and Collaboration (a mouthful, but really cool stuff … that, I can assure you!) – yes I do some other stuff but I could not call myself an expert, such as in routing & switching, Network design and architecture. I’m learning a bit more about security, which I though I knew something but not really!
Cisco Live 2014 – San Francisco
Just wanted to take this time to talk about my experience at Cisco Live 2014, representing the Modcomp team.
It was a great experience and a nice way to meet with people that is in the same boat you are, Engineers that are seeing the same issues you see and others that have it all figured out (You want to be like them!!).
So just to get you started off the narration of this adventure, I wanted to start by adding few things that I think deserve to be mentioned:
So in the traditional Campus Design it used to be Layer 2 from the Access Layer to the Distribution and to the Endpoints, running Layer 3 on the Distribution and the Core, and in most of the cases, you will have a Core/Distribution approach called Collapsed Distribution Core. as shown in the example:
Now moving from that model to a new and recommended approach you can take a look at the Layer 3 or Route Access layer Design, this one has many benefits as follows:
