[300-075] CCNP CIPTV2 - here we go

negru_tudor

So the time has finally come to properly sit down & study for passing the CIPTV2. I've been procrastinating this long enough (for good reasons though) but I need to get it done until the 7th of August or I loose the simple upgrade from Voice to Collab & have to sit 4 exams instead of 1.

For the past 1.5 years or so I've been doing a lot of Cisco voice mixed with route & switch (emphasis on voice though) so I hope studies will go a little bit smoother than what they were in 2014 when I studied for CCNP Voice but didn't really do that much Cisco voice; nowadays, I kinda live on CUCM, Unity & voice gateways. We don't do much Telepresence though but do use ILS across 9 clusters we look after (with the 10th to be added soon) so that part I'm a little bit more comfy with. Fortunately, we do run Expressway on one of the clusters & I've been exposed to it / snooping around how it's configured & doesn't seem too tough to grasp.

I plan on going through both CIPTV1 and CIPTV2 material just to be safe / prepared.

The study resources I plan on using:

- http://salesconnect.cisco.com

- Official Cisco Bootcamp study resources (Student Guide & Lab Guides) for both CIPTV1 and CIPTV2 which I got from 2 colleagues of mine that attended official bootcamps



- https://www.ciscolive.com/global/on-demand-library (they have some killer content on a LOT of Collaboration topics & it's free)

- Foundation Learning Guides (FLG) for CIPTV1 and CIPTV2

- IP Expert, INE and Kevin Wallace CCIE Collaboration videos

- Some Pluralsight videos (got a 3 months free subscription to their stuff via a Microsoft dev initiative)

- I also do UCCX & Finesse so I bought & will be using this as well: https://www.amazon.com/Deploying-Unified-Contact-Center-Express/dp/1329184629

- Some cool YouTube vids I ran across like https://bit.ly/2qwJc86 or https://bit.ly/2HCYAaa and many more; there's good stuff laying around on YouTube

For the lab, I have moved most of the stuff to EVE-NG & managed to create a pretty cool CIPTV2 topology with a twist (UCCX and a little bit of BGP & MPLS just to put some of those R&S skills to use as well):



However, I will be connecting some real gear into the topology as well for media resources and some ISDN. I have a 2801 (stacked with PVDM2s, E1/T1 controller and FXS module) along with a 2811 (stacked with PVDMs, E1/T1 and FXO module) and a good ol' 3550 switch to power some IP phones on my desk if needed.

I also have about 3 x 9971 (with camera) sets, an EX-60 and some SX units (SX10 and SX20) at work which are considered lab kit (not used in production). There's also a 2911 in the lab at work stacked with PVDM3 resources but seeing how Cisco have moved away from PVDM conf bridges (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/unified-communications/tdm-gateways/bulletin-c25-735945.html) it might not be needed at all - maybe just for 1 - 2 tests.

Combined with the real gear I had from the NP Voice days, I think it should cover most of what's needed.

Well, with that said, I'm going to get started on this come tomorrow. Hopefully with a little bit of luck & work, I'll slay this one by mid-July.

Off I go now ..



EDIT: this needs to be moved to the CCNP Voice sub-forum. Just noticed I posted in the general CCNP thread. @mods feel free to move it across as needed. Thanks!

negru_tudor

Well, so far managed to get halfway through the CIPTV2 Student Guide material & I can't say that I'm impressed. The older CIPT1 & CVOICE where a lot more hands on / thorough. CIPTV1 leaves the impression that it's mostly "talking" about these concepts not necessarily teaching the stuff.

I'm grateful for having started out with the Voice track instead of Collab when I got into Cisco Voice.

The Telepresence bit will surely be a little bit more interesting. Found that this Pluralsight course (https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/building-conferences-telepresence-ciptv1-300-070) is pretty ok to get started with.

negru_tudor

Welp, managed to wrestle around with Expressway-C and E for MRA for 2 days and finally managed to get it working properly with CUCM and IM&P in my EVE-NG lab.

The biggest pain was working with certificates. The Microsoft CA I had deployed in the lab issued certificates that were not valid the instant I had them issued so it took me a little while until I got to the bottom of things. Just went on the lab NTP server and gently "pushed" the time ahead a couple of hours

The other MAJOR "gotcha" was that I was trying to set up the "traversal zone" as Traversal Server (on the Edge) and Traversal Client (on the Core) which was ok for x8.1 but it changed apparently. For x8.9 (what I was using) the "traversal zone" must be set to Unified Communications Traversal .. these 2 ate up most of my time. I was following this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLWVribzUCQ

The final fu*k up was that my external DNS server had a typo in the FQDN that the SRV record was pointing to..

SRV record would resolve to hq-exp-01.lab.com instead of hq-exp-e01.lab.com ... had me going bananas for a couple of hours.

The overall process is surprisingly straight-forward I guess if you manage to get it working once.

This post (https://supportforums.cisco.com/t5/other-collaboration-voice-and/cisco-vcs-mra-there-are-no-unified-communications-traversal/td-p/2693645) really helped and pointed me in the right direction.

... and RTFM does help when dealing with Jabber MRA (https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/expressway/config_guide/X8-9/Mobile-Remote-Access-via-Expressway-Deployment-Guide-X8-9.pdf)

Next-up some heavy-ILS-lifting and CUCM GDPR (the good kind, not the spamming type we get nowadays)

negru_tudor

Just for my own reference (if ever I come back looking for this), high-level steps for Jabber MRA for CUCM 11.5 and Expressway 8.9:

1) Create an AXL user account on CUCM (and Unity).

Expressway-C will use this account to authenticate & pull data for external Jabber clients asking for service

2) Install the Expressway-C and Edge servers (leave 3 x NICs on both servers; messing with them causes issues)

Expressway-C will only use 1 NIC
Expressway-E will use 2 NICs with the Advanced Networking license loaded; the third is in quarantine - unused for now

3) On the initial Setup Wizard on both nodes select just the MRA offering

4) License the Expressway-C using these PAK types:

- LIC-SW-EXP-K9
- LIC-EXP-SERIES

5) License the Expressway-E using these PAK types:

- LIC-SW-EXP-K9
- LIC-EXP-SERIES
- LIC-EXP-E
- LIC-EXP-AN (if using 2 NICs on the Edge server)

6) Set up IP addresses, DNS, NTP on the Core and Edge servers (these services need to be provisioned before installation)

Optionally, go to "Configuration > Protocols" and turn H323=OFF and SIP=On to get rid of alarms

7) On the Expressway-E under "System > Network Interfaces > IP" set the LAN1 to Internal (LAN facing) and LAN2 to External (WAN facing).

The Default gateway or "IPv4 gateway" as it's called on the Expressway-Edge is the EXTERNAL default gateway (public IP of the carrier)

7') On the Expressway-E under "System > Network Interfaces > Static routes" set a static route to your LAN subnets going out through your LAN1's internal gateway (since the default gateway is set to the IP of the carrier)

8 ) I used a Windows CA on the LAN segment (guess a WAN-bound one would have worked as well); download the RootCA from the Windows server (http://ip_of_ca_server/certsrv/certarc.asp) and upload it to both the Core and Edge servers (Maintenance > Security certificates > Trusted CA)

9) On the Windows CA, download the CRL (certificate revocation list) from the same spot and load it to Expressway Core and Edge (Maintenance > Security Certificates > CRL management)

10) Create a new Certificate Template on the Windows CA (name it something easy to spot like CiscoClientAuth) with the "Client Authentication" extension

11) Generate a CSR on each Expressway server and via the Windows-CA's web interface, sign these with the "CiscoClientAuth" template created in 10)

12) Load each of these certificates to the "Maintenance > Security Certificates > Server certificate" (don't mix them up; Core goes to Core, Edge to Edge)

13) Restart the servers after the certificates are loaded!!!

14) On the Expressway-Core, "discover" the CUCM, Unity and IM&P nodes using the AXL account in step 1) (go to "Configuration > Unified commun.")

15) On the Edge, create a new zone of "Unified Communications traversal" for the firewall traversal.

The "TLS verify subject name" needs to have the internal FQDN of the Expressway-C server. Other than this, the rest kind of stays untouched.

15') On the Core, do the same and for "Peer1" use the FQDN of the LAN IP address of the Expressway-Edge server. Make sure you use the same port (7001 by default)

16) On the Core, configure the domains that MRA users will be using to register. Go to "Configuration > Domains", define your domain (ex: lab.com) and select:
SIP Registration and provisioning on Expressway: on
SIP Registration and provisioning on Unifed CM: on
IM & Presence Service: On
XMPP Federation: Off

17) On the external DNS (public DNS server), define a FQDN for the public IP address of the edge server: hq-exp-e01.lab.com

18 ) On the external DNS server, define a SRV record that points to this public FQDN _collab-edge._tls.lab.com (using port 8443) pointing to hq-exp-e01.lab.com

19) Configure your Jabber user profiles normally, stick a Jabber outside of the LAN with access to the public DNS server (and routing to the Expressway-Edge's public IP dooh) and enjoy!

Word of Warning: I was using Windows2012 as the RootCA and the certificates it cut out weren't yet valid when I had them loaded to the Expressway Core/Edge pairs so the Traversal zone was not coming up.

If you see the "certificate is not yet valid" message in the Expressway-Core (Status > Log > Event Log) then you're probably either going to have to wait until they become valid or try to flip time from the NTP server a couple of hours ahead

That's about it I guess.

negru_tudor

ILS and GDPR kick SAF/CCD a$$ any time of the day lol

Cisco also seem to have removed SAF/CCD from the new CCIE Collaboration v2 blueprint that's being adopted in July this year. I expect it to be removed form the CCNP Collab topics on the next refresh.

I was also going through some of my old CVOICE, CIPT1 and CIPT2 resources and can't help but feel that there was a lot more useful day-to-day info in the way those courses were laid out than the new Collab layout.

I have a feeling that the next CCNP Collab refresh will actually be a lot more balanced than what Cisco did with the first revision. It feels like a lot of the cool stuff in Voice days was just skimmed over in Collab... or I may simply be getting old Still, I look forward to seeing TPS/Conductor removed, CMS make its way in instead and get the tracks more in synch / up to date.

Sitting the exam on the 13th of June so a couple more days to go - cram time. Wanted to sit on the 15th but the center was all booked on the 14th and 15th. Figured that if I fail, I still have 1 or 2 attempts left until August when my CCNP Voice expires.

negru_tudor

So, due to anxiousness I went ahead and moved the exam 1 day ahead which means that I'll be sitting the 300-075 (CIPTV2) tomorrow. Honestly can't hang around anymore and wait for it to come my way so I took the fight to Cisco

I somehow hope to squeeze in a pass (managed to make good progress with Expressway and some of the new CUCM 10.X stuff on the blueprint) but if I fail, that should still leave me with almost another ~2 months (until the 8th of August) to retake, sit and pass. I hate to be going in with the "hey, I may fail this and it's ok" mentality but based on the feedback I got from co-workers and what I could read on almost any legit Cisco forum out there is that 300-075 is an awful exam (for all the wrong reasons).

Still, the pressure of having a deadline kind of helped me put in some more serious hours in reviewing older topics that I learned back when doing the CCNP Voice and getting a little bit more familiar with the Expressway (and VCS to a lesser degree), Enhanced locations, ILS/GDPR and the TPS/Conductor combo.

Pluralsight's stuff is great for the Telepresence Conductor + Server stuff; they also have a good video series on "SRST and Enhanced Locations" although the SRST bit for SIP isn't necessarily 100% accurate.

I still feel that the old CVOICE + CIPT1 + CIPT2 were fine the way they were & that Cisco should have:

1) Removed SAF/CCD from CIPT2
2) Squeezed Expressway-Core/Edge (MRA) into CIPT2
3) Squeezed VCS and Telepresence either in the CAPPS blueprint or do a separate specialization exam or something

Comparing the official Student Guides side by side for CIPTV1 and CIPT1 for example, I can say that the CIPTV1 is a crammed together mess trying to be both CVOICE, CIPT1 and some Telepresence in a single course but not getting deep enough, so a shallow experience. CVOICE and CIPT1 however, man you had QoS done right, voice gateways done right, CUBE done right and Call Manager stuff with great amounts of detail and very focused knowledge with examples on every topic to have stuff sink in. Well, rant is over - time to squeeze in a last review and get some rest

negru_tudor

So the big one is on my 2017-2018 list is finally down: scored a pass today on the 300-075 (CIPTV2) to upgrade my CCNP Voice to Collaboration.

My thoughts on the exam:

- skimmed across / went to lightly into topics that are the bread & butter of day-to-day Voice/Collab stuff
- questions with VERY poor wording. Seriously Cisco, get your sh!t together please. The quality difference between R&S exams & Collab is jarring. You get questions that say pick 1 answer when there's 2 correct options out of 5 or 6. WTF?!?! Left some comments on the questions & I really hope the people who are responsible for the exam experience read & act on them
- too many "which menu > sub-menu > sub-menu" would you use to get this part of this feature working
- very very light on the practical front

I'm happy to have passed it, don't get me wrong but at the same time I'm sad because I know what the exam experience was like on the CCNP R&S track. I can't help but wonder when will Cisco give the Collab/Voice track a fair & proper treatment and make things more practical.

Over & out.

clarson

congrats on the pass.

Thanks a lot on the exam into. Even more about telling cisco about how their exam can be improved for those that follow

negru_tudor

clarson wrote: »

congrats on the pass.

Thanks a lot on the exam into. Even more about telling cisco about how their exam can be improved for those that follow

Thank you, anytime.

The new CCIE Collab v2 blueprint makes me hope that when the time comes to review / refresh the CCNP Collab, they'll do a better job at it.

Legacy User

Congrats on the pass!

negru_tudor

dmarcisco wrote: »

Congrats on the pass!

Appreciate it, thank you!