So, now that we’ve discussed who the major players are, let’s take a closer look at why it’s really such a big deal that we can now deploy our Unified Communications products as part of our virtual infrastructure, using the Cisco UCS.

The best way to learn is to engage in hands-on practice using real equipment in a non-production environment. Having crashed a few networks in my time, I can tell you that having the freedom to make changes on the fly without any risk can reduce unnecessary pressure and keep you focused solely on learning. Having said that, don’t use consumer-grade devices for this type of preparation, as they do not even remotely resemble the actual Cisco components used in the exam environments. Ideally, if you have older components in your work environment, then by all means use those.

In the summer of 2011, I attended my first Cisco Live event. For years – even when it was called Networkers, I’d heard how great a show it was. Needless to say, I was excited. I didn’t get to stick around Cisco Live 2011 long enough to hear William Shatner and Carlos Dominguez in the final keynote. Missing that was a huge disappointment. This year, I’m planning to be there the whole week — from the welcome reception to the final keynote address. This year, I’m planning to be there the whole week — from the welcome reception to the final keynote address.

Why must you be so careful when using debug commands?

Anyone who’s managed switches over the years knows that the Spanning-tree protocol (STP) is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to the data center at layer 2 of the OSI model.

On the plus side, the Spanning-tree protocol is what first allowed us to create redundant paths within our switching infrastructure, making our data center much more resilient to outages than ever before. Anyone who’s experienced a “broadcast storm” knows the full value of Spanning-tree in the traditional switching environment. We’ve also seen many improvements in Spanning-tree over the years to make it work faster and more efficiently (i.e. Rapid Spanning-tree, Bridge Assurance, and many others).

Previously, I talked about the logical and physical steps to building a basic certification lab, concentrating mostly on the CCENT/CCNA Routing and Switching level. Once you have that set of certifications under your belt, there are several options for specialization. Each of these advanced technology tracks serve as methods of enhancing your professional skill set as follows:

When configuring a site-to-site IPsec tunnel, which of the following is a valid command?

While the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) is at the heart of Cisco’s UC design, there are many additional components that greatly increase the organization’s capabilities to stay connected.

For example, a few of these additional server-based resources include:

As I mentioned in a previous post Cisco has a complete portfolio for data centers to support the ongoing journey towards cloud computing through pervasive virtualization. One of those products we will discuss is the Nexus 5000. This was the first Cisco switch that supports a new technology called I/O consolidation. But first, before we discuss what I/O consolidation is, let us first examine what’s new for this technology in the new data centers according to Cisco Data center 3.0.

Which type of IPv6 address is a global unicast address that is assigned to more than one interface?