Overview of Cisco Unified Communications Devices

[Music] hey welcome back to the channel everybody and in today's video we're going to take a super high level overview of some of the common elements that make up a cisco unified communications network now if you've been following me for a while you know that i've got a real passion for the collaboration track in the world of cisco and the reason is it goes back literally to my birth this is legit check out this picture this is a picture of me in a telephone central office my milk is being warmed on a soldering iron in the background my dad's holding me my dad was a central office supervisor at our local gte telephone office for many many years so i grew up in and around a telephone environment and i have seen telephony evolve from no kidding this is the actual phone that my family had when i was born this phone is older than i am it's an old rotary phone this is where you would stick your finger in the dial rotate it and it would return to its starting position that's where it started out when i was born and we've come so far since then and today i just unboxed this guy just a few days ago brand new from cisco this is a cisco 8865 video phone that we're going to be able to hook up and have it communicate and register with a cisco unified communications manager server and as i build out the collaboration track i'm going to be dripping some of that content here on the youtube channel and to set the groundwork i thought we should probably first as we're going to do in today's video give you an idea of some of the different pieces and parts that make up a cisco unified communications network now disclaimer this is not going to be comprehensive you're going to say oh he didn't talk about cisco unified contact center express the reason i selected the devices that i've selected for this video those are the devices that i want you to know for cisco's cl core exam the collaboration core exam so we're going to take a look at those specific devices and then over the next few weeks you'll see me pop in some other collaboration content here on the youtube channel and as always if you enjoyed today's video please give me a like down below and subscribe so you don't miss any of our weekly content now let's take a high level overview of some of the players that make up a cisco unified communications network let's take a look in this video at some of the devices that we might find in an enterprise unified communications network and this is not going to be a comprehensive listing there are other cisco unified communications components but these are the ones specifically that i want you to know for the cl core exam first let's imagine that we have an internet connection coming into our enterprise coming into our router and that router connects out to a switch which is going to connect to other devices one of our main unified communications devices is a cisco unified communications manager or a cucm for short now some people will call this a call manager because back in the day it used to be called the call manager several years ago but now call manager is technically not the name of the server call manager is the name of a service that runs on the server but what is this cisco unified communications manager server well it's referred to as a call agent this is essentially a pbx replacement it's going to make our call forwarding decisions we can set up restrictions as to what device can call what other device we can set up route plans to determine what digits get forwarded to the pstn what digits get displayed on our phone we can have users associated with those phones in fact most of our configuration in this course is going to be done on cisco unified communications manager it's really the star of the show when it comes to cisco unified communications but notice that i've got this label as cucm pub that's to indicate that this is a publisher server and a publisher server is going to keep a read write copy of the database that's going to be shared by all the servers within a cluster and i'm also going to add because we typically do i'm going to add another cisco unified communications manager server this one is a subscriber now a subscriber has a read-only copy of the database and it learns information such as configuration changes now by the way not everything is just read-only there are some things that do get written to the subscriber but the big definition i want you to know is that it has a read-only copy of the database and it's going to learn configuration from the publisher and the reason we might have a couple of servers number one is for redundancy if one server goes down the other server if it has the capacity can take over the responsibility of registering all the phones that had been registered to the other server it's also going to give us some load balancing so one processor doesn't have to bear the load of all of the phones on the network but cisco unified communications manager does not give us voicemail for example as a feature we need something else to do what is called unified messaging and the enterprise level unified messaging solution is cisco unity connection and we abbreviate that as cuc for short now i hesitate to call this a voicemail server even though it does a great job of being a voicemail server because it can do lots of other things as one example we could set up a call handler as it's called to handle a call coming into a certain number and we could interview somebody we could say call this number and we're going to take a company survey about what corporate outing we should have and we could play a message saying hey would you like to go to this destination press one this destination press two we could collect information like that that's just one example that goes beyond basic voicemail but it does do a great job of voicemail another server we might have is the cisco instant messaging and presence server or immp for short this is going to allow us to use a software-based client on our machine be it a laptop a desktop a smartphone it's going to allow us to use a client called jabber cisco jabber can be used as your instant messaging client to message somebody else within your company and you can see if they're available or not based on the color of the dot next to their contact information if it's red they might be busy if it's yellow or orange they might be away from their desk if it's green they might be available right then that's presence information which is the willingness of someone to accept a call right then and these are the big players in cisco unified communications there are other servers but these are the big ones that we're going to be setting up and configuring in this course and when we're sending phone calls we may be using a physical cisco ip phone such as a cisco 8845 ip phone or it could be a software application like i mentioned jabber earlier that could run on your laptop your smartphone that's another way of placing audio and or video calls another way to make audio and or video calls is using cisco's telepresence solution and telepresence is going to deliver very high quality audio and video and the form factor of a telepresence client varies widely you might have a telepresence client that sits on your desk that has a video screen and a good quality camera or you might have a telepresence room constructed in your company where you go into this room and you see maybe three large tvs mounted around a conference table and people at three remote sites are sitting around a similar configuration and it appears that you're all in the same conference room well roughly it appears that way but it's a much more intimate and in-person feeling than you would get using just a regular phone because the audio quality is so realistic we're not just going for 4000 hertz and below we have cd quality audio here but here's a challenge we might run into we might have a firewall for our enterprise network so here we've inserted a firewall and another router to speak out to the internet and the reason i say this could be a challenge is what if we have somebody with the cisco jabber client on their phone and they're working from home or some remote location they're out on the internet somewhere how can they get in to the communications manager and register with the communications manager and the iman presence server and the cuc server because the firewall is going to block them well cisco has a solution for that they describe it as a firewall traversal solution the specific product they have is called cisco expressway and here we're going to have a couple of expressway servers i'm going to have one hanging off of that internet facing router and i'll have one on the inside of our network and notice that one expressway is labeled with an e and one is labeled with a c here's what's going on the e stands for edge it sits at the edge of our network not protected by the firewall so that jabber client it could connect to that expressway edge server now i've got a server on the inside of my network the expressway c and the c stands for core the jabber client would not be able to speak directly with that device so here's what's happening the expressway core it forms a tunnel through the firewall with the expressway e the expressway edge in other words and our jabber client out on the internet it can connect to the expressway edge server and then it's going to be able to use that tunneled connection between the edge and the core expressway servers to get into the network and register with our internal servers the question is who does that jabra client point to to get to the expressway server which is going to get it to the communications manager server well there's going to be a dns server on the internet that internet-based jabber clients are going to use that will point to the expressway edge server and that's their pathway to get into the communications manager server but for clients that are already on the internal network they need another dns server notice we've got a dns server on the internet that's going to point our jabber client to the edge expressway server and i've got a dns int for internal server and when my internal clients try to resolve the communication manager's ip address their response is going to be the actual ip address of the communications manager but when that cisco jabber client on the internet says all right what's the ip address of this communications manager server the internet-based dns server is going to give it the ip address of the expressway edge so we've got to have two different dns servers that will answer the same question differently depending on whether the client is inside of the network or outside of the network we might also want to connect that router out to the pstn that's connecting out to the internet the pstn that again is the public switched telephone network that's the worldwide telephony network and that router that gets us out to the internet if it's got the right feature set and the right interfaces in it we can have it act as a voice over ip gateway and we're going to see in this course how to configure that router in a variety of ways we can make it a sip gateway running the session initiation protocol we can make it an h.323 gateway we can make it an mgcp gateway we'll see how to set all of that up but realize the router that can give us a path out to the pstn another device that we might have in our network that we need to know for this co core exam is called a cube which is short for a cisco unified border element and what this does it will join together two different call legs notice the icon for the cube it looks like there are a couple of separate calls going on and the cube is the connective tissue that joins those together for example let's say that i want to connect out to an internet telephony service provider in other words i'm not going out to the pstn directly myself i'm going to connect to an ip telephony service provider via ip and they'll get me to the pstn i don't need all those digital circuits going out to the pstn well that call leg might have certain parameters maybe we need to be using sip the session initiation protocol on a particular port but maybe that's very different than what we use internally internally we might be using sip differently we might be using h.323 for whatever reason we need to take these two different call legs one from the cube out to the internet telephony service provider and one from the cube back into the network we need to take those two colleagues and join them together that's what the cube is going to do for us and by the way you might also hear that cube referred to as a sbc for session border controller and at this point our cisco unified communications manager devices are primarily at the enterprise location at the headquarters but what if we have a remote office well we might reach that remote office over an ipwane connection maybe it's metro ethernet maybe it's some sort of mpls but someway we have a wane connection that's getting us over to a remote office and that remote office they also have ip phones and one option is for those ip phones to register over the lan it's possible that they could register with the communication manager servers back at the headquarters but i want to show you another option another option is for that remote site to have their own call agent now maybe it's not economical to buy a cisco unified communications manager publisher and then an additional cisco unified communications manager acting as a subscriber what we can do instead is have a cisco router act as that call agent we can have a cisco unified communications manager express so instead of a cucm we've got a cucme where the e is express that is a less feature rich call agent as compared to the cisco unified communications manager but it's still very robust it's going to give you a lot of telephony features for a remote office and that router can get that remote side out to the internet to the pstn because it can act as a gateway and out to the ipwan to get back to the headquarters now internally inside that remote site the cucme router might connect to a switch which might have one of our cisco iphones connected to it not just physical phones we could still use cisco jabber but what about voicemail or i should say unified messaging because it does so much more than just voicemail what is our unified messaging solution well one option is to use something called cisco unity express remember our messaging solution back at the headquarters was to use cisco unity connection well here we're using cisco unity express and this can come in a couple of different form factors you might have a physical circuit board it's called a daughter board that you insert in your router it could be the same router and typically is the same router that's acting as the cisco unified communications manager express router but it doesn't have to be and to make sure you understand they are different functions i portrayed it here in this topology as its own separate device so again the cue could be a physical device or we could have a virtual cisco unity express or a v cue that is a virtual machine that's going to act like a cisco unity express module so it could be hardware or software giving us that scaled-down version of unified messaging and again this is not a comprehensive listing of all of cisco's unified communications servers there are multiple other servers the first one that comes to mind is cisco unified contact center express that we could use in a call center there's also a contact center enterprise and the list goes on and on but here we're focusing on the cisco unified communications services that you need to know for the co core exam

Channel: Kevin Wallace Training, LLC

Views: 9,602

Keywords: cisco, cisco collaboration, clcor, 350-801, CCNP, collaboration CCNP, CCNP collaboration, call manager, cisco unified communications, #kwtrain, ip phone, cisco unity, cisco presence, cisco cube, cisco cucme, cisco unity express

Id: aLShMTsRSXo

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020