#networkers2010 – Restaurant day 3 – Seven Portes

There are times you go to a place and something is very memorable. A few (quite a few) years ago, I went with my wife and some of her family to this restaurant and had exceptional food, and wonderful service. So it seemed only right that on the last night, a couple of my colleagues should be shown, what I believe is one of the best restaurants in Barcelona.

The 7 portes was opened more than 170 years ago which says something about the establishment. I had a simple desire from the menu, a seafood platter – astonishingly, there were three to chose from, so I went with the Seafood Medley – which contained steamed shell fish, including lobster, mussels, prawns and langoustines. This can only be described as the freshest, finest meal of the week (and they have all been excellent, so that is some claim). My colleagues also raved about their meals – the farmhouse chicken, was succulent and plentiful, while the brochette of sausages were also devoured with enthusiasm and enjoyment - “bangers and mash” Spanish style!

The service was excellent as would be expected in a place that has survived this long. An all together thoroughly enjoyable experience (again!).

#networkers2010 – BRKUCC-2003 A new appraoch to call routing and dial plans based on the Service Advertisement Framework

Stefano Giorcelli presented this new concept, which is his baby, effectively dynamic routing for dial plans. This is an exciting concept, as the configuration of dial-plans to this point has been done statically. The ability for call-agents to advertise destinations onto the network and for other cal-agents to learn this detail should revolutionise dial plan implementation.

SAF is aimed to advertise any service (not just dial-plan) onto the network, and thus is partly competing with various other technologies, e.g. Bonjour, Service Location Protocol, DNS SRV, however it differs from these technologies as it is not an overlay to the network, but is part of it.

There are two components to enable the call routing ability – Call Control Discovery and SAF agents. The CCD comprises a schema based on XML, thus the detail is easily read from the network. It is available with release 8.0(1) of the Unified Communications platform (CUCM, CUCME, IOS voice gateways)

The SAF network allows both static and dynamic learning of neighbours, which do not need to be physically adjacent, allowing for dark SAF-unaware networks between neighbours enabling deployment to be phased into the network. SAF will initially be available for ISR/ISR-G2 s in 15.0(1)M code and is planned in most other network platforms.

For me, this was the most exciting session of the conference – it was forward looking, provided a solution to an age old problem and was one of those “why didn’t we think of that sooner” kind of moments. I look forward to getting hold of FCS code and trying it out in my lab and getting to see it on a production network.

Stefano is after feedback on what we’d like to see in the future for this, and with his enthusiasm for the subject I can see this going far.

#networkers2010 – BRKCOL-2015 Cisco Unified Communications Interoperability with Microsoft

Hmm, I had been unsure of taking this given that I had taken the Advanced Presence techtorial and expected significant overlap. It did have some overlap, but there was enough new content to make it worthwhile.

Toby Neumann from the advanced presence techtorial gave the session and after some disclaimers regarding other companies products went through the Microsoft and Cisco (ie OCS vs CUPS) solutions to the same problem. He compared the use of SIP Proxy (ie OCS) vs Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA), and how B2BUA is a more feature-rich solution, due to the fact that SIP Proxy is not allowed to manipulate the media.

There was also a discussion of the MOC to MOC unimpaired network one-way delay – circa 140msec of codec delay – vs the ITU specification which specifies 150 msec as a maximum for good call quality. It was pointed out that the CUCIMOC client is about 100msec. All this is due to the software nature of the codec processing which cant really be compared to the dedicated DSPs provided in phones where the codec delay is significantly less.

The use of Remote Call Control was discussed, and how Microsoft is dropping support from OCS in future releases. There were detailed discussions on other integration methods.

The various client integrations – click-to-call using client services framework, and CUCIMOC 7 & 8 – were detailed. Client Services framework seems to have a big part in Cisco’s future of integration with desktop services.

Toby left us with the thoughts that the choice of what and how to integrate is up to yourself!

#networkers2010 – BRKCCT-2013 Planning and Designing a Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal Deployment

Oh dear. I walk in with five minutes to go, and it is Shahzad Ali and myself, meet the engineer without planning it. Shahzad is the guy who wrote the CVP SRND, so what he says is gospel regarding design and implementation of this stuff. More people did turn up (I think we got to a maximum of about 20).

This session was effectively a detailed session on planning and design, no configuration or troubleshooting on the menu. The session focus on the direction that Cisco are taking the product with more and more focus on SIP and less and less focus on H.323. There was a detailed section on branch design which highlighted the issues and solutions for ensuring that media stays in branch where it belongs.

There was a final section on CVP 8 and upcoming enhancements including courtesy callback – which is something everyone has wanted for a long time.

Shahzad kept the session moving well, and threw in a few quizzes with little prizes to keep everyone interested. The tiny crowd definitely got value from their time

#networkers2010 – restaurant day 2 – Sagardi Diagonal Mar

Another restaurant review, people are going to start to think all we do here is eat and drink (which is only partially true). The Diagonal Mar shopping centre is opposite the conference centre. It is a modern shopping centre and on the third floor is the food hall and cinema (didn't go and see a movie and skip a session – honest). All the usual suspects are up here – Burger King, the golden arches, dunkin donuts and a couple of places that serve beer. Outside at this level are a selection of restaurants, one of which is the Sagardi.

This is most definitely a meat house, vegetarians would probably not be best served here. So to the food – would you like steak or steak or paella with meat. So steak it was – two Tenderloin steaks and the house specially of rib steak. It must be noted here that the meat is excellent, but if you like a well done (ie burnt) piece of meat, you will be out of luck here. The tenderloins were medium and I have had rarer steak when asking for blue. This is not a criticism, I like my meat like that, but it may not be to everyone's tastes. All told, the meat was excellent, the rib steak was served as a sharing plate, and everyone enjoyed it.

Desert was equally as good. My truffles were an excellent finish to the meal, and the flaming apple pie (lit with calvados) went down a storm.

So – three nights – three excellent meals – what could top that. One more restaurant to write about (hint – its called the seven portes)

#networkers2010 – BRKUCC-2014 CME and CUE – or the Jerry de Boer show

If you have never seen Jerry present, then he is worth the price of admission alone. First an admission, CME/CUE is not a core product for me, being well versed the big brothers, so this was an interesting session for me to see what is used outside of my regular patch.

This session focused on new features in both products and was rammed full of content, the slide deck alone will take some reading when I download it later. Jerry didn’t dwell on every page of every slide and kept the topics pacey. It was interesting to see that the IOS-based CME/CUE feature set has places where it is ahead or CUCM and others where it is behind.

Jerry’s anecdotes made the session enjoyable, providing insights into everything from his wife’s shopping habits, to his 8 year-old daughter’s mastery of extension mobility!

I’ll have to review the slide deck again to get a better appreciation of the products, but as an introduction to its capabilities, is was a real eye-opener. As Jerry said, most of the features are already there – its just knowing that you can use them, and they are free within the product!

#networkers2010 – restaurant day 1 (techtorial day) – la Barceloneta

The restaurant la Barceloneta is in the area know as Barceloneta. Its primary dishes are fish and seafood. Recommendation 1 – take someone else to pay the bill ;-) and they may prefer it if you stay away from the live spiny lobster! That out of the way, lets discuss the food

Tourist mistake – order starters and expect them all to arrive together – so when the plates of fish and chicken nibbles arrived, they were shared around between the six of us – and very good they were too, the fish bites were especially light and fluffy. Then the mini-prawns and squid in garlic arrived – two plates – and we realised that we’d been culturally inept! So we shared the excellent plates of non-rubbery squid and tasty prawns. Main course was a more simpler affair (no-one ordered spiny lobster !). Three plates of the baked turbot, and a few meat dishes arrived – what can I say about the turbot – except that it is a fine fish, and the dish was executed brilliantly – I’m a fussy eater, but the accompanying vegetables were so tasty and complemented the dish exceptionally well that even I ate them. Desert was usual fair and exceptional again.

So, again, one to put on the list for maybe again next time.. 2 nights down 2 to go (as it’s Wednesday I already know what last night was like, but you’ll have to wait and see)

#networkers2010 – BRKGENPNL-1971 Unified Communications and IPv6

Panel sessions - at previous Networkers I have attended, these have been post-6pm events, and thus you had to be really keen to go to these. Now they are lunch-time interruptions - although a buffet lunch is provided, and there is actually enough time afterwards to get the proper lunch.

The panel for this was split into three - two Unified Comms guys, two network guys (one Service Provider, one Enterprise) and a non Cisco guest (Google person who had actually done real IPv6 deployments). The host introduced this session as a discussion he had been meaning to have with his colleagues that we had been invited to join in with.

The panel discussed the benefits and challenges of moving to IPv6 - and explained how it is inevitable that we have to go there soon. The UC products (specifically Cisco Unified Communications Manager) are ready to be deployed in this manner from version 7, and it is very simple to get this up and running, either in lab or production. It was emphasised that the current recommendations is to run in dual stack mode with IPv4, to ensure compatibility with applications that are IPv6 ready.

As a "dog food" exercise, the IP phones and public wireless infrastructure at Networkers is running IPv6. I have checked this out and the Dragon dances thus I am cool (apparently). I have also used this to check that my home ipv6 network really does have a deny policy on it’s inbound interface (how often do you get to connect to an external IPv6 network ;-))

#networkers2010 - BRKUCC-2018 Call Admission Control for Unified Communications

Hmm, I've seen enough Cisco EMEA keynotes to know that unless its John Chambers, then they are optional ;-) So a slightly later start for day 1 (techtorial day is really day zero!) of the conference - glad to see they listened to the feedback years ago from the advisory council ;-)

 

So Call Admission Control (CAC from now on) - what is it about? Opening statement - "Video killed the network administrator" - One of the major focuses of this year's networkers is Video. It was pointed out that the session could fit 65 people in the room, but 100 people had registered for the session, so if the excess people had subscribed to the session for a video feed at just 384kbps - that would have be more than 10 Mbps of bandwidth to service the excess attendees (yes the session was full - and people were standing at the back).

 

CAC takes two forms based on whether it is topology aware or not (there are actually four primary CAC mechanisms but Cisco only supports two of them). Topology unaware CAC is best used on hub and spoke topologies, it is provided using either Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) locations, or gatekeeper zones. It is not suitable for topologies where there are multiple paths, or hierarchical topologies.

 

Topology aware CAC is provided by RSVP. RSVP is an old protocol that got a really bad wrap when it tried to do the whole QoS process. Newer techniques using a mix of DiffServ(DSCP-based) and IntServ(RSVP-based) QoS techniques means that RSVP is the new preferred CAC mechanism. RSVP sends a message from the source to the destination to check that the required bandwidth can be reserved before the call setup proceeds. RSVP does require that some of the routers within the path between source and destination are RSVP enabled. If a hop is not RSVP enabled, the reservation request is passed transparently to the next hop.

 

The original RSVP requirement expected the endpoints to be RSVP aware (i.e. intelligent endpoints), with the advances in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and related devices, this functionality is now moved to an RSVP agent which is an IOS device "near" to the endpoint (controlled by media resource groups) which provides the initial reservation request for the endpoint.

 

The session was very focused on RSVP, and the presenter’s  (Vanessa again from the presence techtorial) opinion was that RSVP will become the standard CAC method and that combined with SAF – see a posting coming soon – h.323 gatekeepers will start to fade away.

One take away regarding CAC that Vanessa made provides a good analogy for non-technical people - "CAC is this - If a boat is made for 5 people and a you let a sixth person get in the boat, you all drown!"

#networkers2010 - TECUCC-3002 Advanced Presence: Protocol, Design, Interoperability, Implementation and Demo

Welcome to Networkers 2010, Barcelona. Lets start with an easy session - level three techtorial (optional, paid for, day before the main conference begins) - probably the most intensive day of the conference. This session was an intense immersion into the world of presence. Session 1 (post breakfast - pre-coffee break), a detailed look at the two presence camps - SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP (Jabber). Both protocol stacks were compared and contrasted - SIMPLE - not simple, but very chatty, lots of tcp connection setups and teardowns, very much a response, acknowledge, response, acknowledge conversation - versus XMPP(Jabber) – let’s setup a streaming connection and pump XML stanzas down the pipe. Which is best?  Cisco takes the agnostic approach and (in Cisco Unified Presence Server - CUPS - version 8 - released any day now - now we understand why Cisco acquired Jabber!)) does both.

 

This detailed protocol discussed was followed by sessions on CUPS 8, how to configure it, how to federate it (link to other presence repositories) with the likes of Microsoft OCS by either SIP/Simple (the tested and proved method) or the new XMPP gateway, or Google Talk (via XMPP). This is to note regarding this federation, its only Inter-domain federation, rather than intra-domain federation (e.g. two sets of users within an enterprise - one using Cisco presence, the other using Microsoft OCS).

 

The highlights of this session were XMPP related - which given that the new version 8 CUPS server's biggest new features all revolve around XMPP should not be a surprise - the demos showed that the enterprise desktop does not belong only to Microsoft in the presence and unified communications space. Demonstrated was Apple desktop to Windows desktop, full presence client on both desktops, with status updates coming from Blackberry devices, and then calls between the users using video, hmm - does it get much better! CUPS client on Windows,  Apple open source XMPP client on Macbook - call established, job done.

 

The presenters of the content were excellent, there were supposed to be three, but only two made it. Thanks Richard, Vanessa and Toby were brilliant. This was not my first networkers, but this was by far the best session (all be it a day long session), I have been to. Can this be topped with the rest of the week?

#networkers2010 – restaurant review day zero

Sunday evening in Barcelona (ie between the hours of 5pm and 9pm) is very quiet – remember that when trying to locate a restaurant! Its even harder when its raining! Still after some searching and being pestered, restaurant was suitable acquired. Unfortunately I can’t remember its name (it is now Wednesday!). However – if you go to Port Olympique, and get past all the other restaurant striving to capture you for themselves, then right at the end of the strip is a gem.

The service was excellent and the food superb. I had the veal fillet with fois – a large tender fillet arrived and was consumed with much enthusiasm. My colleagues had, the beef steak and were also suitably impressed. Desert was also impressive with my crème brulee was light and fluffy, while my colleague’s ice-cream sundae was most wateringly large – he did not share. All of this was consumed at a reasonable price.  Definitely one for the list next year

#networkers2010 – an introduction

This year’s EMEA Cisco Networkers event is in Barcelona.  It’s my third networkers – the previous two being in Cannes – so If I come next year I should be a “NetVet”. I’ll be posting reviews of the sessions I have attended and a follow-up at the end of the conference with final thoughts and maybe suggestions for next time. I’ll probably post some restaurant reviews as an aide-memoire for next year or for anyone who still needs to eat in Barcelona.