One more great video on Session management

Great video on Session management and interoperability with Legacy PBX's and leveraging your current investments.

High level UC 9.0 overview.

Look for another post shortly with more information!

Great Overview Of Cisco Microsoft Interop.

Jabber for iPad

Jabber for iPad is now available for install from the Apple App store.  Here is a quick video guide on the features and functionality of the client.




The admin guide for Jabber for iPad can be found in this location:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/jabber/iPad/Admin_doc/output/b_Jabber_for_iPad_admin_guide.pdf#page31

Additionally, here is the Jabber for iPad TMS Provisioning Template.

Happy Jabbering!

VCS Root Account Password Recovery

"I forgot to document the root password on my VCS (C/E) and I need to ssh as Root to perform X... How do I reset the root password?"

This is a question I get frequently.  The process is actually very simple, but requires console access.  Here is the procedure taken straight out of the VCS Admin guide.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/telepresence/infrastructure/vcs/admin_guide/Cisco_VCS_Administrator_Guide_X7-1.pdf

Resetting an administrator or root password

If you forget the password for the default admin account or any other administrator account, log in to the VCS using the account of another administrator with read-write access and change the password.

However, if you do not have any other administrator accounts with read-write access, or have forgotten the passwords for them all, you can set a new password for the admin account using the following procedure. This can also be used if you have forgotten the password for the root account:

1. Connect a PC to the VCS using the serial cable as per the instructions in VCS Getting Started Guide.
2. Restart the VCS.
3. Log in from the PC with the username pwrec. No password is required.
4. Select the account (root or admin) whose password you want to change.
5. You will be prompted for a new password.

The pwrec account is only active for one minute following a restart. After that time you will have to restart the system again to change the password. 

UC on UCS

Wanted to make sure everyone was aware to make this change on all Virtualized Unified communications.  This is a known issue with VMware and Linux host.  I have seen this cause very weird issues on a UC deployment.  

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Disable_LRO

Note:

After upgrading the ESXi host to 4.1 or 5.0 and upgrading VMs to VMwareTools to 4.1 or 5.0, you may experience slow TCP performance on VMs running on the 4.1 or 5.0 ESXi host. You can address this situation by disabling Large Receive Offload (LRO) on the ESXi host.

To disable LRO, follow this procedure:

1. Log into the ESXi host or its vCenter with vSphere Client.
2. Select the host > Configuration > Software:Advanced Settings.
3. Select Net and scroll down slightly more than half way.
4. Set the following parameters from 1 to 0:
   • Net.VmxnetSwLROSL
   • Net.Vmxnet3SwLRO
   • Net.Vmxnet3HwLRO
   • Net.Vmxnet2SwLRO
   • Net.Vmxnet2HwLRO
5. Reboot the ESXi host to activate these changes.
   

Your guest VMs should now have normal TCP networking performance.

Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) VM Appliance

Prefer the small footprint and virtualized deployment model?  VCS Control and Expressway appliances are now available as VMWare appliances with the VCS 7.1 code. 

For those interested in the minimum specs and supported configurations, please see the deployment guide.

It is important to note that there are some unsupported features with this initial version of the VM appliance.

1. ESXi 4.1 compatible, but not ESXi 5.  During testing there was a problem related to an LSI RAID card that caused an issue.
2. VMWare fault tolerant mode is not supported because the VCS uses dual cores.  VMotion IS supported.