Unless you have been hiding beneath a rock for the past few months, you will have noticed that the Collaboration market is trending towards the cloud and that means less on-premise equipment for Collaboration Engineers to install, configure and maintain. Central to Cisco’s collaboration cloud strategy is Cisco Spark. This is an app that allows secure business messaging / file sharing, meetings through Spark rooms and video/audio calls.
In July 2016 at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Cisco SVPs Rowan Trollope and Jens Meggers, and Cisco VP Jonathan Rosenberg gave a sneak peek into what the future holds for Cisco Spark. The demonstration at the keynote showed the audience that a new telepresence unit can be taken out of the box and connected to the cloud in a matter of minutes with very little technical configuration. There is no need for anything on-prem- you just need an account in the cloud and the Serial Number of your client you are good to go. Furthermore, in Fall 2016 Spark will be integrated into iOS 10 which will allow enterprise voice/video calls to be made from an iPhone or iPad. Lots of cool new things in the pipeline! Keep a close eye on Rowan’s blog. Continue reading State of the Union – Shift to the Cloud (CCIE Collaboration)→
This is a quick note for all folks out there who are planning to sit a CCIE Written exam in the near future, you may want to consider sitting the test within the next 7 days!!!!
This is because all CCIE Written exams will include a new section called Evolving Technologies as of July 25 2016. Please see here for more info.
The new section will account for 10% of every Written exam. The blueprint for the new section is shown below:
Use case: We have an active call through the CUBE and we want to see the codec that is being used along with the media ip addresses and RTP port numbers.
R2# show call act voice comp
A/O FAX T Codec type Peer Address IP R:
Total call-legs: 2
307 ANS T13 ilbc VOIP P2001 192.102.64.50:24818
308 ORG T13 ilbc VOIP P3001 192.102.65.50:31562
This video covers how to police voice, signaling and video traffic from phones on the Catalyst 3750 . It is one of a series of videos taken from the CollabCert LMS self-study product.
As well as updating the CCIE Data Center track, Cisco have recently updated all CCIE Written exams. A new section called “Evolving Technologies” has been added and accounts for 10% of all CCIE Written exams. The remaining 90% of the exam is made up from the core topics that are relevant to the specific track you are taking. The go-live date is July 2016.
The idea behind the update is to “enable candidates to bridge their core technology expertise with knowledge of the evolving technologies that organizations are adopting at an accelerated pace, such as cloud, IoT, and network programmability.”
Spend 10 minutes of your life learning about the 403 Forbidden response. The good people who are studying for CCIE Collaboration will most likely have run into this time and time again- enjoy!
This video covers how to use RTMT to grab SIP Traces and how to format the text-based answers that are required as part of the Troubleshooting Tasks within the CCIE Collaboration Lab Exam.
In this example we want to apply a policer to each individual phone at a branch office so that each phone can only produce enough bandwidth for 1 g711/g722 audio call. Non-conforming voice traffic (RTP packets above the 93Kbps used for that single g711/g722 audio call) will be dropped. The idea here is there must be something sinister going on if a phone is producing more than 1 calls worth of traffic and we want to protect our network by dropping this sinister traffic at the source. The other requirements are that video traffic from each individual phone is policed to 1Mbps and signaling is policed to 24kbps. In both of these cases we won’t drop the non-conforming traffic but instead mark down the layer 3 DSCP Per Hop Behavior to a lower priority (CS1 or DSCP 8).
The question of how much bandwidth does a call consume is something that has occupied the minds of many “collaboration” engineers over the years and specifically is something that you should be aware of if you plan on sitting the CCIE Collaboration lab exam. I’m going to tell you how to do it without referencing any resources.
To set the scene, I want to police Voice/RTP traffic from a phone in my Headquarters office. We shall call this HQ Phone 2.
The policer will be applied on the switchport of HQ Phone 2 (ingress). I am using a 3560X switch.
The details of the policer are as follows: we will assume that conforming packets are all RTP packets for 1 g722 call. Any traffic above and beyond what is needed by 1 call is going to be non-conforming and is subject to an “exceed” action within the policer. The conforming action of the policer is to set the DSCP to the PHB of Expedited Forwarding (EF) and transmit. The exceed action of the policer is to drop packets.
We would like to congratulate Marcus Lundbom (CCIE # 45333) on passing his CCIE Collaboration Lab exam. Marcus attended our bootcamp at the end of June. Cool CCIE Number by the way!
Once again congrats to Chad Alder (CCIE # 45276) from the October class and thanks for sending through the following testimonial.
“It is my happy and humbling pleasure to announce that I have successfully completed the CCIE Collaboration Lab. CollabCert and Vik Malhi has put together an exemplary level of experience and support for the CCIE Collaboration that will help anyone from first timers to seasoned exam takers to achieve his/her goal in becoming CCIE Certified. There are CCIE companies out there, but CollabCert provides a culture that can be described as a family to all candidates committed to build quality and experienced Collaboration Engineers.”
Hopefully we will see you in one of our Collab bootcamps in 2015.
