The Cruft Of My Brain

I’ve been hearing this rumor for a while now that Cisco is getting into the blade server business.  I’m having a hard time with this being a smart move but I can see the reasoning.  Om posted about the latest rumors today and I think he hits on some important points.

It’s not like making servers (well, lets be honest and call it rebranding) is new to Cisco.  They’ve been selling CallManager, Unity, ACS and various other servers for years.  They started putting Pico-ITX size (I think) PC’s on NetMods for the ISR routers years ago as well.  The NM PC’s are probably the closest thing they have to blade servers.  In general these devices have done pretty well although I’d argue that Cisco hasn’t maximized their potential.  Still, going from a single NM in a router to a blade chassis with specific cooling, SAN and addressing requirements is a pretty big jump.

What’s Cisco hope to gain?  I think the question should be more like, what do they stand to lose?  Everything I’ve heard about Cisco’s entry into the data center, mostly the Nexus platform, is that it’s been slow going.  They haven’t been able to get the penetration they want.  I don’t think that’s especially surprising as that market was already somewhat mature and had several niche players leading it.  No, my guess is that they expected it to be a slow start, just not as slow as it’s been.  This is the usual problem for Cisco.  They are seen as a networking company, not an “everything to IT” company.  The server guys look at Cisco as “that networking stuff that I have to have.”  They don’t really like dealing with the network jockey.  If Cisco really does come out with a blade server it’ll be derided as Ver. 1 gear and not mature enough for production use.  And that’ll be somewhat true.

Something to remember though is that Cisco did this before.  About 10 years ago they decided to step on the voice guys toes.  It took a while and they had some real pain in the beginning but look at where things are now.  Who’s bankrupt?

Speaking of voice, is it just me or does it seem Cisco has decided on an incremental growth strategy for their voice platform?  There’s a distinct feeling of a lack of attention on the voice product.  I’m excluding the telepresence stuff from that as it’s so damn expensive.

I’ve been graciously receiving CiscoPress books for review for a while now so it’s about time I actually, you know, review one.  First up is the newest CVoice book:

I’m going through a re-cert process right now but I’m also trying to head towards the CCVP.  CVoice is one of my required tests for both of these so it’s the first one I’m tackling.  Earlier this year Cisco changed the requirements for the CCVP and rolled the old Gateway/Gatekeeper (GW/GK) test into CVoice and called it version 6.  Luckily this book was written just for that!

I took the test blind once to see what was on it.  Failed miserably.  I then began reading the book.  I found the book to be very comprehensive in the early sections.  Specific questions that I know I got wrong I was able to track down the general answers to.  This book isn’t some kind of cheat sheet but it does seem to follow the test pretty well.

I felt the sections on protocol characteristics, h.323 Gateways and MGCP configuration were all pretty thorough, as it relates to the test.  The section on Dial Plans was especially good.

The one section I found to be short was CUBE.  The CUBE section explained the general nature of the configuration sufficiently but I thought it stopped short of a really detailed description.  I would have liked more detail in this one section.

Of the “Official” test guides I’ve read in the past I thought this was one of the better ones.  A thorough reading of it will prepare you for the test, as well as deepening your understanding of voice gateways in the Cisco world.

Well, I’ve learned something that should have been painfully obvious.  I had the following configured for that SIP trunk to the Cisco router I mentioned:

context=from-internal
allow=ulaw
disallow=all
dtmfmode=rfc2833
host=192.168.169.2
insecure=very
ipaddr=192.168.169.2
port=5060
type=peer

The codec is defined by the “allow” statement.  If you put a “disallow” after the “allow” it will negate the allowed codec.  Well duh.

Swapping those around fixed the problem and making sure the trunk was in the proper context got me past the 404 error I was seeing also.

I’m now on a virtualized Trixbox and it sounds great compared to the previous install on a dedicated but older laptop!

I went forward with the Server 2003 R2 install and then added VMWare Server 2.0.  Trixbox installed very easily and quickly and I added chan-sccp-b using these instructions.  It all went together very well and once I remembered all the places my old config files had old IP’s (I copied over the sccp configs) I managed to get a phone to connect and call to an IAX2 softphone.

However, I can’t get the trunk to the router to work.  I’m getting a 488 error in the debug which seems to suggest a codec mismatch.  Both sides seem to have correct dialplans as they try to call through but all I get is a reorder tone.  The Cisco router really only supports g711 in the current configuration.  Could it be that the Trixbox isn’t enabled for that?  If that’s not the problem, I’m not sure what is, yet.

Stacey over at GigaOM put up Microsoft’s press release about R2 today.  R2′s bringing some much needed feature depth to OCS including better attendant handling, very basic call queueing, dial in audio conferencing and some SIP trunking improvements.  However, this isn’t the “big one”.  R2 still misses some very critical components.  E911 is still missing.  Advanced call queueing and call center type functions are not there.  The SIP trunking is still incomplete.  And a full OCS implementation just requires too many servers!

The reality of Microsoft’s positioning is that a full implementation of the OCS “platform” is too significant an investment for anything but large customers.  The Response Point product fills a nice niche in the S of SMB space.  Unfortunately there’s no upgrade path for Response Point and it really runs out of steam when you get near 50 phones.  Microsoft doesn’t have a good answer for the M in SMB.

However, R2 does position Microsoft for some very capable trials over the next year, all in anticipation of the next major release due sometime late ’09 or early ’10.  I still believe that will be the real battleground.  In a little more than a year Microsoft will truly have a worthy competitor and will start chipping away at Cisco for the Enterprise customers.  Perhaps sometime after that they can find a way to roll several roles into a single platform so the Mid-Market has an option too.

Seems like a silly thing but I’ve never been sure how to check the exact version of CME running.  “show telephony” will do it.  I’m either overlooking something in the GUI or it’s not there.  On a particular router I’m messing with the “About” screen doesn’t show anything.  Maybe that’s broken.

It’s important to be sure of the version running as there are dependencies for phone models and CUE versions.

Anyway…saved for future reference.

Could it be?  I just read this over at GigaOm and I think Allan’s missing the boat.  Now, I’m sure he’s tapped into a lot more resources than I am, but it just doesn’t seem right.  I could see Cisco wanting to see how they can help in the data center to make VMWare a better platform than it already is.  The VMotion technology already works very well, but what’s to stop Cisco from putting some performance hooks in their secret sauce to make it that much better than Juniper.  Also, considering their push into SAN technologies it’s really not a stretch.

I have a different thought.

Cisco’s been shipping what are essentially Linux appliances on NetMods for quite a while now.  The NM-CUE, the IPS module and the WAAS modules are examples, but there are others.  I believe these are x86 based appliances.  These appliances are part of the less frequently used “Branch in a Box” term that Cisco targets for their 2800 and 3800 series routers.  The idea being a single router, which has to be there no matter what, can also bundle in an Ethernet switch with POE, Voice interfaces to service local calls, SRST for redundancy on the voice, a wireless AP on an HWIC, local Unity Express perhaps, local IPS for distributed security, onboard IOS firewall, WAAS module…and I’m probably missing something.

Here’s the current problem.  You can only put a couple of these in at a time!  There’s no way to put all of this in one box (nevermind the wisdom of doing such a thing).

Regarding Allen’s assertion that developers would have to develop for something other than x86 because Cisco doesn’t use that, sorry Allen, you’d be wrong about that.  The NM-CUE and similar modules use a P3 and even the AIM-CUE which is a tiny motherboard attached daughtercard uses a Celeron!

My prediction, look for some beefier NM type appliances.  Maybe even something with Dual Cores.  This will be a “VMWare ESX” appliance in the NM form factor.  It’ll probably even be a couple of them at different sizes to fit the double wide slots.  You’ll choose based on how many VM’s you want to run at a time.  Of course, the IPS, Unity Express, WAAS and other images will all be available, for a license fee.

The big question is, will they also open it to allow you to run your own VM’s on it?  Maybe but maybe not.  Cisco has a history of not allowing that kind of thing.  But here’s an idea, how about running your small(ish) Windows 2003/8 server in VM?  Maybe even something with the WAAS secret sauce built right in.  If it’s a new enough processor you might even be looking a x64.  How about installing Exchange 2007 in that VM as well!

Now we really are talking about Branch in a Box!

I’m not sure how it happened but it would seem FreePBX didn’t install right on the RaqBuntu.  I’ve bene trying to figure out why things won’t register and calls won’t go through.  Turns out the include statements didn’t get populated into sip.conf, just as an example, so it doesn’t seem able to ever find the “additional” stuff FreePBX creates.  Now I’m wondering what else is broken with FreePBX.

So, do I try to fix it?  Maybe I can just reinstall FreePBX and see if that does it.

Or, do I start over on RaqBuntu with a clean slate?

I really don’t feel like reloading that whole thing.  I’m tired…off to bed.

We’ve been working on becoming a Voice Ready Partner with Microsoft for a couple of months now.  We’re finally fully certified (www.ftdata.com) and I’ve learned some things about how Microsoft is approaching the market and from my perspective it looks like the Enterprise UC market is going to be very interesting in a year or so.

Cisco took the approach in the beginning of aiming squarely at PBX replacement.  They developed the CallManager platform into something pretty solid and broad in scope.  In the last couple of years they’ve been working from the middle, towards the edge with app development.  What I mean by that is they’ve been growing apps like Presence and Mobility now that the PBX side of things is pretty much wrapped up.

Microsoft is taking the opposite approach.  Microsoft has been growing their UC product from the outside in.  First with LCS and now with OCS they have a very stable and broad product that does a great job of supporting IM with voice and video.  The PBX side of things needs some development though.

Microsoft is making it clear that they intend on owning that space, primarily by trying to change the way people do business with voice.  I think they have a long way to go but their strategy will get them there.

Consider this.  I was at a customer some months ago and saw them running the Office Communicator client.  I asked what motivated them to do that.  The answer was simple.  It was basically free since they already had an Enterprise Agreement.  Sure, those costs might be kind of hidden but the customer impression is that they are already paying for it so they might as well use it.  Oh, and a $50 eyeball camera and they had video with another office on the other side of the country.  Microsoft will make inroads for this reason alone.  When they finally strengthen some of the other pieces like PSTN access and call center functionality they’ll already have a huge installed base of Communicator clients waiting for those added features.  It’ll be harder and harder to pick up that Cisco phone sitting on the desk.

I’ll be at the Microsoft UC Partner Symposium in Houston on Monday.  I don’t have a lot of free time but if you read this blog and are interested in meeting up to talk about Voice, feel free to drop me a line.

I’ve been working on getting Asterisk running on my RaqAst (that’s what I’m calling it) Cobalt RAQ3.  For various reasons mostly relating to getting chan_sccp to work properly I’ve gone from 1.2 to 1.4 to 1.2 to 1.4.  Yeah, it’s been frustrating.  Anyway, I had a comment left on this post detailing a method of using Asterisk just for voicemail with CME doing the phone management duties.  You might remember I had already managed to do that, again, referenced on that same post, but had failed to get MWI working.  MWI’s important for the WAF.  So, that solution got tossed and I went back to chan_sccp on Asterisk.

Well, the comment directed me to http://uc-b.blogspot.com/ where Andre has apparently gotten MWI working.  So, I’m going to give that a shot and I’ll report back how it works.

In the meantime I need to get Asterisk 1.4 running on RaqAst so I attempted to remove all vestiges of Asterisk 1.2 and install 1.4.  Ok, that seemed to work but every time I’d try to start Asterisk it would look like it was working but it wasn’t.  I’d get no indication it wasn’t starting but a “ps -aef | grep ast” showed nothing.  Also, there was nothing I could find in any logs.

Finally, I figured it out.  I hadn’t removed the 1.2 version of /etc/init.d/asterisk and the 1.4 install wasn’t overwriting it.  Apparently the 1.2 version won’t start 1.4 code.  Go figure.  Anyway, after cp’ing /usr/src/{ast-1.4}/contrib/init.d/rc.debian.asterisk over to /etc/init.d/asterisk everything was happy, as far as I can tell.

I haven’t started the configuration yet but that’s next, now that I have a running Asterisk.