Tag Archives: Collaboration

CCIE Collaboration Overview

State of the Union – Shift to the Cloud (CCIE Collaboration)

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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.
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IOS Troubleshooting, SIP Troubleshooting

Top 10 IOS Troubleshooting Commands for the CCIE Collaboration Lab

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#1 show call active voice compact

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

#2 show call active video compact

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QoS

policing phone traffic on Catalyst 3750

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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.

Vik Malhi, CCIE#13890
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VikMalhi
Twitter: @vikmalhi
www.collabcert.com

SIP Troubleshooting

Why Does CUBE Generate 403 Forbidden?

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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!

Vik Malhi, CCIE#13890
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VikMalhi
Twitter: @vikmalhi
www.collabcert.com

SIP Troubleshooting

Collab Troubleshooting: Using RTMT to grab SIP Traces

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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.

Vik Malhi, CCIE#13890
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VikMalhi
Twitter: @vikmalhi
www.collabcert.com

QoS

Policing on Etherswitch modules

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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).

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QoS

Per Call bandwidth Consumption over Ethernet+802.1Q

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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.

Let’s look at our configuration:

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CCIE Successes

More CCIE Collaboration Successes

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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.

CCIE Successes

CCIE Collaboration- Recent Passes!

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We would like to congratulate two of the delegates from our September bootcamp on passing the CCIE Collaboration Lab exam.

  • Chad Alder (CCIE # 45276)
  • Rob Lacrosse (CCIE # 45283)

Awesome achievement and we are happy to have played a part in helping you achieve your goal.

If you are interested in obtaining the  CCIE Collaboration certification contact sales@collabcert.com or register now for a seat in a bootcamp or workshop in 2015.

Vik Malhi, CCIE#13890
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VikMalhi
Twitter: @vikmalhi
www.collabcert.com

CCIE Collaboration Overview

CCIE Collab bootcamp – Instructor feedback

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After several months preparation of CCIE Collab racks and class material, it came as a relief to finally be back in the classroom talking to humans again! Our inaugural bootcamp took place in our San Jose training center week beginning June 23, 2014- this is just a quick overview of what to expect when you come to a CollabCert bootcamp.

Classroom facility

It was a mad rush to get this classroom ready in time and we just about made it (minus one essential item- the coffee machine). We invested in some purpose built desks large enough to fit 6 endpoints and a computer. We have some really good views of Silicon Valley (not that there was much time to look out of the window). Here are a few  snaps from the inaugural class!

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

The downtown location is 5-10 mins away from San Jose airport with plenty of hotels walking distance away from the facility. I’m really excited that our future customers will enjoy the experience.

CCIE Collab Racks

Our racks are local to the classroom- if there are any issues with hardware/cabling/etc it can be resolved there and then. We have built the racks in an almost identical way to the testing centers. Each student has access to the 9971 and 7965 endpoints on the desk, ISR-G2 gateways equipped with PVDM-3, CUE installed on the SRE and a hypervisor more than capable of running the appliances and Windows servers.

Format of Class

You never really know the format of a class until it has been taught and I was relieved to find that the material could  be covered in 5 days. The format of the Instructor Led Bootcamp is very much focused on the hands-on aspect of learning. The instructor demonstrations and whiteboard chat accounts for about one third of the class with the remaining two thirds open for hands-on lab time. Our labs are delivered using our new web-based Learning Management system and every question that is asked in the lab has a full explanation.  The topics covered in the class as well as the topology can be found here.

What to do before attending class

The class has a big  emphasis on call routing- so knowledge related to the building blocks of the UCM namely Call Routing and its associated features is essential. SIP trunking and SIP Troubleshooting formed a big part of the class- I would say that a third of the time in class was spent troubleshooting SIP signaling and making calls through SIP Trunks. You must have decent working knowledge in SIP Call traces before attending the class. The CollabCert LMS (Learning Management System) and CollabCert Workbook contain particularly large sections related to SIP.

Familiarity with IOS gateways, dial-peers, SCCP media resources is (as was the case with CCIE Voice) another essential part of the course.

You will spend some time on new introductions to the blueprint which include distributed call processing features such as InterCluster Lookup Service (ILS) and Extension Mobility Cross Cluster (a beast!). The more preparation you can do in these areas the better.

Hope to see you in a class soon!

Vik Malhi, CCIE#13890
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VikMalhi
Twitter: @vikmalhi