среда, 1 августа 2012 г.

CCIE Voice Home Lab Gear

I personally prefer to have my own lab at home rather than use any rent racks so that I can turn it on in any moment and try anything I want to. I've spent a few months and quite a lot of money to obtain all necessary equipment, but now I have almost completely authentic lab where I can study and train just everything from the Blueprint. Below is my gear:

HQ Site:

CISCO 2811
WIC-1T for FR
VWIC-2MFT-T1 for ISDN
PVDM2-16
WS-C3750-48PS-S

Branch1 Site:

CISCO 2811
WIC-1T for FR
VWIC-2MFT-T1 for ISDN
PVDM2-16

Branch2 Site:

CISCO 2811
WIC-1T for FR
VWIC-2MFT-E1 for ISDN
PVDM2-8 x2 - we need two dsps at least for one of the sites so that we can play with the Conference Media Resources. It can be PVDM2-32 for example since this module has two dsps on it. PVDM2 dsps use special firmware for conferencing and that is why it can't share dsp with any other function (transcoding, tdm-voip translation and so on). 
AIM-CUE

PSTN-FR Switch:

CISCO 2811
WIC-2T
WIC-1T
VWIC-2MFT-T1
VWIC-2MFT-E1
PVDM2-16

Phones:

7960 as a PSTN phone
Mix of 7941/7942/7961 phones for the sites

I use one 3550 PoE switch instead of both HWIC-4ESW (Branch1 and Branch2) because it's much much less expensive and there are only a few small differences in ports configuration between them. Also I use first genereation VWIC cards rather than VWIC2 for the same reason (we only need to remember one command for VWIC2 - card type e1/t1). And for sure I could use spare ports from the VWIC-2MFT-T1 and E1 for the Frame Relay and it's actually a bit easier - you don't need to purchase WIC-1T cards and cables, but I have had a few such cards and decided to use those. Also I have only one 7961 phone and I rarely have to use CIPC for features testing, because those demand more than two phone buttons.

And by the way, just a small hint. I was trying to get rid of this loud annoying noice from the 2811 routers (switches are pretty quiet) using different ways, but without any success - they didn't cool enough. And all my efforts end up  with this guy - Scythe Kaze Q 5.25'' - 12-channel fan speed controller. I've just removed Network Modules panels and plugged all the fans to the controller. So now I can control fan's speed in the range of 5V - 12V and it's almost always enough to use a minimum (5V).