Continuing on in our series on CCD, today we’ll look at the 3rd video (the shortest) in that series (video #55) from our current 62-hour CCNP Voice v8 bootcamp.
- CCD via SAF :: Overview (29m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM Inter-Cluster Call Routing (1h 32m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM Call Routing with PSTN Failover (29m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM Call Routing during SRST Fallback (48m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM to CME Call Routing (54m)
- CCD via SAF :: Inter-Cluster RSVP via SIP Preconditions (21m)
Tags: Call Control Discovery, CCD, CCIE Voice, ccnp voice, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, SAF, Service Advertisement Framework, UCM
It’s 8:30pm here in Bellevue, WA and I just finished the PfR/OER section of the 10 Day R&S CCIE Bootcamp that was broadcast live online. The session started at 9:30am this morning with a break for lunch and we ended up with roughly 10 hours of video. We had over 5000 unique IP addresses connect during the session and at the peak we were pushing nearly 80GB with our content provider. If you didn’t attend the live session, the recording will be available at the end of this week or first part of next week. I covered everything from basic PfR/OER configurations using static routes and BGP to very advanced PfR/OER configurations using PBR with GRE tunnels. This should be what everyone needs to help them prepare for the CCIE lab and fully understand PfR/OER.
I’ll post an update once the video is available. Additionally I’ll publish the diagrams, initial configurations and some lab scenarios with final configuration so you can follow along with the video.
Lastly I’ll ensure that this video is made available to our customers free of charge. Unlike some vendors who want to nickel and dime you to death by charging you for material that should be included in their main products, I’m going to ensure if you’re an INE customer you get access to the video free of charge.
R&S CCIE Training Video Updates:
As most of you already know we’ve totally redone nearly all of the R&S CCIE training videos over the past year. I’ve removed for sale the vast major of what I will call for lack of a better term, sub-par, R&S CCIE videos that were done in the past by some of our former instructors. After being gone for nearly two years and coming back a year ago I reviewed the quality of the videos in question and the feedback from our customers and decided that these videos where not up to the traditional standard of INE’s products and services. We will continue to add more R&S CCIE videos in the future but they will only be done by Brian McGahan or myself.
R&S CCIE Workbook Updates:
We are in the process of testing out a few options to move the workbooks away from a traditional MS Word document format for authoring and PDF for the final product release. This legacy format makes it hard to make even the smallest change without becoming a major project. We are looking into switching over to a web based format (i.e. wikipedia style) that will allow for a faster updating process and better overall reader experience. We will still offer the PDFs for offline viewing and printing but the latest version will always be available through your members site account. By moving it to the web you will be able to optimize and customize your flow through the products. My personal goal is to move away from a separate product model (R&S Vol I, Vol II, ATC Videos, Mock Labs, etc, etc, etc) to a single all encompassing product (workbook and videos) by the end of 2012.
New Troubleshooting labs for Volume II are going to be in beta starting in June with final release by the end of June. We’re updating the configuration labs after the TS labs are released. The new Volume III will be released starting this week. I’m working on some changes to the Volume I workbook and hoping to start releasing them next month also.
R&S CCIE Rack Updates:
We’re currently using the Cisco 360 topology for my live bootcamps and will start to rent out the racks to customers in June when I’m not running a live bootcamp. The topology is identical using all ISRs (1841, 2811, 3825) and four 3560s but the material is 100% INE’s. Additionally the traditional INE R&S topology will be updated to remove the 2600XMs and consolidate the backbone routers starting in June. Not much will change other than the Serial interfaces on R1 and R2 from S0/0 and S0/1 to S0/0/0 and S0/1/0. All R&S rack rentals will also move to a 3 hour rental block as opposed to the standard 6 hour block. This will allow for more flexible starting and ending times.
R&S CCIE Troubleshooting Bootcamp and Racks:
I’m running the first R&S CCIE Troubleshooting bootcamp the following week here in Bellevue. We have 14 dedicated Troubleshooting racks each using 27 1841s, 1 2811 (FRS) and 4 3550s. You will be able to rent these racks in June in 3 hour blocks and access the same lab material that is used in the Troubleshooting live bootcamp. We will also be beta testing instantaneous grading for them in late June/early July.
Lastly I would like to once again extend the invitation out to any former student who attended an INE bootcamp that wasn’t taught by me to reseat one of my bootcamps. Contact Jeremy Brown at jbrown@ine.com or myself directly.
Update: Congrats to Mark, our winner of 100 rack rental tokens for the first correct answer, that XR2 is missing a BGP router-id. In regular IOS, a router-id is chosen based on the highest Loopback interface. If there is no Loopback interface the highest IP address of all up/up interfaces is chosen. In the case of IOS XR however, the router-id will not be chosen from a physical link. It will only be chosen from the highest Loopback interface, or from the manual router-id command. Per the Cisco documentation:
For BGP sessions between neighbors to be established, BGP must be assigned a router ID. The router ID is sent to BGP peers in the OPEN message when a BGP session is established.
BGP attempts to obtain a router ID in the following ways (in order of preference):
- By means of the address configured using the bgp router-id command in router configuration mode.
- By using the highest IPv4 address on a loopback interface in the system if the router is booted with saved loopback address configuration.
- By using the primary IPv4 address of the first loopback address that gets configured if there are not any in the saved configuration.
If none of these methods for obtaining a router ID succeeds, BGP does not have a router ID and cannot establish any peering sessions with BGP neighbors. In such an instance, an error message is entered in the system log, and the show bgp summary command displays a router ID of 0.0.0.0.
After BGP has obtained a router ID, it continues to use it even if a better router ID becomes available. This usage avoids unnecessary flapping for all BGP sessions. However, if the router ID currently in use becomes invalid (because the interface goes down or its configuration is changed), BGP selects a new router ID (using the rules described) and all established peering sessions are reset.
Since XR2 in this case does not have a Loopback configured, the BGP process cannot initialize. The kicker with this problem is that the documentation states that when this problem occurs you should see that “an error message is entered in the system log”, however in this case a Syslog was not generated about the error. At least this is the last time this problem will bite me 
Tags: ios xr, mpls l3vpn
CCIE SPv3 Rack Rentals – which include IOS XR – are now out of beta and available for normal scheduling via the INE Members’ Site. The rack topology is based on our CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Lab Workbook and the CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Advanced Technologies Class.
Currently each session costs 20 tokens, and each session is 3 hours long. If you purchase tokens in bulk this basically means that SPv3 rack time is around $3 per hour. Token based sessions start on Monday May 7th. People who booked beta sessions before this time (i.e. through Sunday) will still maintain their free sessions. Anyone who booked a beta session on Monday May 7th or later has had your session removed. You can of course add them back through the scheduler, but the sessions are no longer free to book after the end of this weekend.
A brief video on how to use the new scheduling system and SPv3 Rack Rentals is available here.
We’re continuing to add functionality to the new scheduler and its control panel, which includes choosing a config to pre-load before a session starts via the control panel, remote power control via the control panel, loading product configs, saving your current configs, renaming your previously saved configs, downloading your previously saved configs, and re-loading your previously saved configs onto a current session or session scheduled in the future.
If anyone runs into any problems with the scheduler or any of its features please submit feedback so we can get these issues addressed as soon as possible.
Thanks and good luck in your studies!
Tags: ios xr, rack-rentals, spv3
I’m very proud to announce that once again INE will be awarding CCIE scholarships. We will be awarding 8 CCIE R&S scholarships and 2 CCIE Voice scholarships. The R&S scholarships will be awarded one per region: Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, Middle East, North America (US/Mexico), Oceanic (Australia) and South America. The CCIE Voice scholarships will be awarded globally. Each scholarship includes:
- 2 Year All Access Pass (access to all of our videos)
- 1500 Tokens for Rack Rentals or Mock Labs Exams
- CCIE Lab Exam Voucher (value $1500 to $1800)
- Complete Set of CCIE Workbooks
- Live Onsite 10-Day Bootcamp Seat
In addition to the 10 scholarships that INE is awarding I’m going to personally award 8 more that I will pay for out of my own pocket (basically the CCIE lab exam vouchers worth at least $12,000). Some people in the industry like to talk about helping others but I’m going to put my money where my mouth is This means there will be a total of 18 CCIE scholarships given away in 2012 by INE worth nearly $250,000.
Since INE has been so successful over the years helping people become CCIE’s and making INC 5000′s list of Fastest Growing Educational companies last year and will again this year, it’s vitally important that we give back to the community that has continued to make INE the leading CCIE training company in the industry. It’s important for any company in the education business to always balance growing the business with helping people and that’s why we are giving back. We try to pass on part of that success by offering free training (CCNA Voice, CCNA R&S, etc), free customized polo shirts when you pass the lab, keeping our pricing low and by offering these scholarships.
To apply for the scholarship you can use the link below:
http://www.ine.com/ccie-scholarship.htm
Good Luck!
Brian Dennis, CCIEx5 #2210 (R&S/ISP-Dial/Security/SP/Voice)
bdennis@ine.com
Internetwork Expert, Inc.
http://www.INE.com
Tags: CCIE R&S, CCIE Scholarship, CCIE Voice, community, giving back
INE is proud to announce that our long awaited CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Rack Rentals are now available, which includes access to IOS XR routers! Furthermore during the initial beta testing of our new rack scheduling system, SPv3 rack rentals are FREE to book! Our new rack scheduler is easier to use than the previous version, and breaks rack sessions down into 3 hour blocks as opposed to the previous 6 hour blocks, which allows for more granularity and affordability in your study schedule. The new scheduler will remain in beta for the next week or so, during which sessions are free to book, but are limited to 1 concurrent session scheduled per customer. Below is a short HOWTO video that I created on using the new scheduling system:
For those of you on mobile platforms the direct link is http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzgoiS9tPI
Additionally a new update has been posted to the CCIE SPv3 Workbook, which now includes the first Full Scale Lab. These updates can be found in the Workbooks tab of the members site, as seen in the above video.
Tags: ios xr, rack rental, updates
So we continue our series on CCD, something that is being talked about lately – in conjunction with UCM SME (Session Management Edition – think UCM as a Gatekeeper for other UCM clusters) – and something that is bound to be covered on the next version of the CCIE Voice blueprint (something that’s received a lot of chatter lately with the advent of UCM v9 beta training this week). Also, a topic that you must know understand well today if you are studying for your CCNP Voice CIPT2 exam.
Today we’ll look at the 2nd video in that series (video #54) from our current 62-hour CCNP Voice v8 bootcamp.
- CCD via SAF :: Overview (29m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM Inter-Cluster Call Routing (1h 32m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM Call Routing with PSTN Failover (29m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM Call Routing during SRST Fallback (48m)
- CCD via SAF :: CUCM to CME Call Routing (54m)
- CCD via SAF :: Inter-Cluster RSVP via SIP Preconditions (21m)
Tags: Call Control Discovery, CCD, CCIE Voice, ccnp voice, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, SAF, Service Advertisement Framework, UCM
Cisco keeps giving this week by allowing any desktop to join – for free – into any existing Telepresence video, and the quality of this video is really, really good. John Chambers recently said that Video is already the #1 traffic driver over Cisco’s internal network, and that by 2013 it is expected that over 90% of all traffic over the internet will be based on Video. There’s never been a better time to be training for Unified Communications!
Tags: CCIE Voice, CCNA Voice, ccnp voice, cisco, jabber, Telepresence, UC
Just announced at the Cisco Partner Summit yesterday, Cisco is making Unified Presence, IM and it’s Jabber client for Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Cisco Cius, Blackberry and all Android devices completely FREE. This probably has something to do with how badly they’ve been spanked in Presence server and client sales by Microsoft basically giving away the presence features of Lync (although MS does make you pay when you want to add Voice/Video features to those clients – just as Cisco will). At any rate and for whatever their reasons and motivations – I personally think it is a very, very smart move for Cisco. It’s also one that makes complete sense seeing that UCM v9 is about to go into beta testing next week. Understanding that the Jabber client can interact with video from any IP phone or Telepresence unit, and the fact that Cisco announced that this free Jabber client and Presence support is not only for those with existing IP Phones, but for every member of any enterprise with a UCM server, this makes the announcement all that more powerful. This doesn’t include Voice or Video, but those can be enabled later with a simple license upgrade. Still not bad at all – especially with the new Jabber client for Windows, and the fact that once installed it enables all MS Office apps to have native presence tied into them directly to Cisco Jabber. This was the entire reason that Cisco purchased Jabber.
Another thing that Cisco is making free (at least for some limited time) is their WebEx Meetings Beta offering – for up to 25 participants. This includes desktop sharing and VoIP as well. Sign up here.
Also of no small merit, Cisco just shipped its 50 millionth phone – that’s 50,000,000 phones shipped. I still remember putting in my first Selsius Call Manager more than 13 years ago. Not bad Cisco, not bad at all.
Tags: cisco, free, jabber, presence, unified communications
