If you’re in the tech industry, it never seems like there’s any downtime. That was the case today all thanks to my friend Greg Ferro (@etherealmind). I was having breakfast when this suddenly scrolled up on my Twitter feed:
After I finished spitting out my coffee, I started searching for confirmation or indication to the contrary. Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) provided it a few minutes later by finding the following link:
EDIT: As noted in the comments below, Brandon Bennett (@brandonrbennett) found a copy of the page in Google’s Webcache. The company in the linked page says “Madras”, but the rest of the info is all about Meraki. I’m thinking Madras is just a placeholder.
For the moment, I’m going to assume that this is a legitimate link that is really going to point to something soon. I’m not going to assume Cisco has a habit of creating “Cisco announces intent to acquire X Company” pages out of habit, like this famous Dana Carvey SNL video. In that case, the biggest question now becomes…
Why Meraki?
I’ll admit, I was shaking my head for a bit on this one. Cisco doesn’t buy companies because of hardware technology. They’ve got R&D labs that can replicate pretty much anything under the sun given enough time. Cisco instead usually purchases for innovative software platforms. They originally bought Airespace for the controller architecture and managment software that originally became WCS. The silicon isn’t as important, since Cisco makes their own.
Meraki doesn’t really make anything innovative from a hardware front. Their APs use reference architecture. Their switch and firewall offerings are also pretty standard fare with basic 10/100/1000 connectivity and are likely based on Broadcom reference designs as well. What exactly draws in a large buyer like Cisco? What is unique among all those products?
Cisco’s Got Its Head In The Clouds
The single thing that is similar across the whole Meraki line is the software. I talked a bit about it in my Wireless Field Day 2 post on Meraki. Their single management platform allows them to manage switches, firewalls, and wireless in one single application. You can see all the critical information that your switches are pumping out and program them accordingly. The demo I saw at WFD2 was isolating a hungry user downloading too much data with a combination of user identification and pushing an ACL down to that user limiting their bandwidth for certain kinds of traffic without totally locking that person out of the network. That’s the kind of thing that Cisco is looking for.
With the announcement of onePK, Cisco really wants to show off what they can do when they start plugging APIs into their switches and routers. But simply opening an API doesn’t do anything. You’ve got to have some kind of software program to collect data from the API and then push instructions back down to it to accomplish a goal. And if you can decentralize that control to somewhere in the cloud, you’ve got a recipe for the marketing people to salivate over. For now, I thought that would be some kind of application borne out of the Cisco Prime family.
If the Meraki acquisition comes to fruition, Meraki’s platform will likely be rebranded as a member of the Cisco Prime family and used for this purpose. It will likely be positioned initially towards the SMB and medium enterprise customers. In fact, I’ve got three or four use cases for this management software on Cisco hardware today with my customers. This would do a great job of replacing some of the terrible management platforms I’ve seen in the past, like Cisco Configuration Assisstant (CCA) and the unmentioned product Cisco was pitching as a hands-off way to manage sub 50-node networks. By allowing the Meraki management software to capture data from Cisco devices, you can have a proven portal to manage your switches and APs. Add in the ability to manage other SMB devices, such as a UC 500 or a small 800-series router and you’ve got a smooth package you can sell to your customers for a yearly fee. Ah ha! Recurring, cloud based income! That’s just icing on the cake.
Ruckus just had their IPO. It was time for a shake up in the upstart wireless market. Meraki was the target that most people had in mind. I’d been asked by several traditional networking vendors recently who I thought was going to be the next wireless company to be acquired, and every time my money landed on Meraki. They have a good software platform that helps them manage inexpensive devices. All their engineering goes into the software. By moving away from pure wireless products, they’ve raised their profile with their competitors. I never seriously expected Meraki to dethrone Cisco or Brocade with their switch offerings. Instead, I saw the Meraki switches and firewalls as an add-on offering to compliment their wireless deployments. You could have a whole small office running Meraki wireless, wired, and security deployments. Getting the ability to manage all those devices easily from one web-based application must have appealed to someone at Cisco M&A. I remember from my last visit to the Meraki offices that their name is an untranslatable word from Greek that means “to do something with intense passion.” It also can mean “to have a place at the table.” It does appear that Meraki found a place at a very big table indeed.
If you’re a person that is using VMware or interested in starting, you should be a member of the VMware User Group (VMUG). This organization is focused on providing a local group that talks about all manner of virtualization-related topics. It can be a learning resource for you to pick up new techniques or technologies. It can also serve as a sounding board for those that want to discuss in-depth design challenges or project ideas. The various regional VMUGs have quite a following, with many quarterly meetings encompassing a full day of breakout sessions and keynote addresses.
I signed up for the Oklahoma City VMUG about six months ago shortly after confirmation that I had been selected as vExpert for 2012. I wanted to gauge interest in VMware locally and hopefully get some ideas about where people were taking it outside my own experiences. I work mostly with primary education institutions in my day job, and many of them are just now starting to realize the advantages of virtualizing their systems. In fact, my previous virtualization primer was directed at this group of individuals. However, I know there are many more organizations that are making effective use of this technology and I hoped that many of them would be involved in the VMUG.
What I found after I joined was a bit disjointed. There didn’t seem to be a lot of activity on the discussion boards. I couldn’t really find the leadership group that was in charge of meetings and such. As it turned out, there hadn’t even been a VMUG meeting for almost two years. There were a lot of people that wanted to be involved in some capacity, but no real direction. Thankfully, that changed at VMWorld this year thanks to Joey Ware. Joey is an admin at the University of Oklahoma Heath Sciences Center. He jumped in the driver’s seat and started planning a new meeting to allow everyone to circle back up and catch up with what had been going on recently.
When I arrived at the meeting on Nov. 12th, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I know that organizations like the New England VMUG and the UK VMUG are rather large. I didn’t know if the OKC VMUG was going to attract a crowd or a basketball team. Imagine my surprise when there were upwards of 50 people in the room! There were university administrators, energy company architects, and corporate developers. There were VMware employees and even an EMC vSpecialist. After a welcome back introduction, we got a nice overview of the new things in vSphere 5.1. Much of this was review for me, having been tuned in during the launch at VMWorld this year and reading great blog articles released thereafter (check out the massive archive here courtesy of Eric Seibert). It was great to see so many people looking at moving to vSphere 5.1. Of course, I couldn’t let the whole briefing go without injecting a bit of commentary about one of my least-liked features, VMware Storage Appliance (VSA). VSA, to me at least, is a half-baked idea designed to give cost conscious customers access to advanced VMware features without buying a SAN or even take the time to roll their own NAS from a Linux distro. It really feels like something someone threw together right before a code freeze deadline and got it on the checklist of Cool Things You Can Do In vSphere. If you are at all seriously considering using VSA, save your time and money and just buy a SAN. Now, during the VMUG session, there were several people that mentioned that VSA does have a place, but purely as a last ditch option. I’d tend to agree with this assessment, but again save your resources and get something useful.
We got a good discussion about vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) from Sean O’Dell (@CloudyChance). VMware is really pusing vCOps in 5.1 as a way to increase your productivity and reduce the chance for human error in your configuration. They are really trying to push it by making the Foundation edition free in vSphere 5.1. The Foundation edition helps you get started with some of the alert capabilities and health monitoring pieces that many admins would find useful. Once you find that you like what vCOps is telling you and you want to start using the more advanced features to start managing your environment, you’re ready to move up to the Standard edition, which does cost around $125/VM in packs of 25. If you’re managing that many VMs today without some kind of automation, you should really look at investing in vCOps. I promise that it’s going to end up saving you more than 25 hours worth of work over the course of a year, which will more than pay for itself in the long run.
Tom’s Take
My first VMUG was well worth it. I was really happy that there were that many people in my area that want to learn more about VMware and want to talk to people that work with it. Just when I think that I’m the only one trying to do awesome things with virtualization, my peers go out and show me that I don’t really live in a vacuum. I really hope that Joey can keep the OKC VMUG going far into the future and keep spreading the word about virtualization to anyone that will listen. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get brave enough to give a presentation sometime soon.
If you are interested in joining your local VMUG, head over to http://www.vmug.com/l/pw/rs and sign up. It’s totally free and open to anyone. For those reading my post that are in the Oklahoma City area, the link to the OKC VMUG workspace is here. We’re going to try to have quarterly meetings, so I look forward to seeing more new faces after the first of the year.
When I gave my cloud presentation earlier this year, I did indeed have about 10% of my audience walk out on my presentation by the end. I couldn’t really figure out why either. I thought that an overview of the cloud was a great topic to bring up among people that might not otherwise know much about it. Through repeated viewings of my presentation, I think I realize when I lost most everyone. I should have stopped after my cloud section and spent the rest of the time clarifying everything. Instead, I barrelled through the next section on virtualization with wild abandon, as if I was giving this presentation to a group of people that were already doing it. Instead, I should have split the two and focused on presenting virtualization in its own session.
When I got the chance to present again at the fall edition of this conference, I jumped at the chance. Here was my opportunity to erase my mistake and spend more time on the “how” of things. Coupled with my selection as a vExpert, I figured it was about time for me to evangelize all the great things about virtualization. If you are at all familiar with virtualization, this is going to be a pretty boring presentation to watch. Here’s a link to my slide deck (PDF Warning):
Here’s the video to go along with it:
Not my worst presentation. I felt it came off rather conversationally this time instead of a lecture. We did have some good discussion before the video started rolling that I wish I had captured. One of the things that really took me by surprise was the lack of questions. I don’t know if that’s because people are just being generally polite or if they’re worried about the quality of their question. I’m used to being in presentations at Tech Field Day where the delegates aren’t afraid to voice their opinions about things. I’m beginning to wonder if that is the exception to the rule. Even at other presentations that I’ve been to locally, the audience seems to be on the quiet side for the most part. I’ve even considered doing a TFD-style presentation of about two or three slides and the rest becomes a big discussion. I know I’d get a lot out of that, but I’m not sure my audience would appreciate it as much.
I’ve also noticed that I do need to start being careful when I’m in other presentations. In one that I attended two days after this video was made, I had to strongly resist the urge to correct a presenter on something. An audience member asked a question about BYOD security posture and classification and the answer that was received wasn’t what I would have wanted to get. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and kept my mouth shut. What about you? If the presenter is saying something totally wrong or has missed the point entirely, would you say something?
Tom’s Take
In the end, most of it comes down to practice. When you assemble your slide deck and practice it a couple of times, you should feel good about the material. Don’t be one of those presenters that gets caught off guard by your own slide transitions. Don’t laugh, it happened in a different presentation. For me, the key going forward is going to be to reduce the slides and spend more time on the conversation. I’ve already decided that my content for 2013 is going to focus around IPv6. People have been coming to me asking about my original IPv6 presentation from 2011, and due to the final exhaustion of IPv4 from RIPE and ARIN, I think it’s time to revisit that one with a focus on real-world experience. That does mean that I’m going to have a lot of my plate in the next few months, but when I am done I’m going to have a lot of good anecdotes to tell.
The final Network Field Day 4 (NFD4) presentation was from Juniper. Juniper has been a big supporter of Tech Field Day so getting to see some of their newest technology and advances was just another step in the the wonderful partnership. We arrived Friday afternoon to a very delicious lunch before settling in for the four hour session.
We were introduced to one of our own, Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad). Derick was a delegate and NFD2 and has recently come to Juniper as the PM of Automation. It’s always nice to see someone from Tech Field Day in front of us for the vendor. Some have said that the vendors are stealing away members of the Field Day community, but I see it more as the vendors realizing the unique opportunity to bring someone on board the “gets it.” However, I couldn’t let Derick off the hook quite that easily. At Cisco Live, Derick proved his love for Dave Ward of Cisco by jumping up during Dave’s OnePK panel and throwing a pair of men’s briefs at him with “I ❤ Dave” written on the back. Lots of laughs were had by all, and Dave seemed appreciative of his gift. Once I learned the Derick was presenting first for NFD4, I hatched my own fan boy plot. When Derick walked up front to face the NFD delegates as “the enemy,” I too proved my love for the Cloud Toad by jumping up and tossing him a pair of underwear as well. These were adorned with “I ❤ @cloudtoad” to show Derick that he too has groupies out there.
Derick then proceeded to give us a small overview of the decision he made to join Juniper and the things that he wanted to improve to make everyone’s life a bit better. I can tell the Derick is genuinely pumped about his job and really wants to make a difference. If someone is that excited about going to work every day, it really doesn’t matter if it’s for a vendor or a VAR or even a garbageman. I only wish that half the people I work with had the same passion for their jobs as Derick.
Our first presentation was a bit of a surprise. We got a first hand look at storage from Simon Gordon. Yes, Juniper shook things up by making their first peek all about hard drives. Okay, so maybe it was more about showing how technologies like QFabric can help accelerate data transfers back and forth across your network. The two storage people in the room seemed fascinated by the peek into how Juniper handled these kinds of things. I was a bit lost with all the terminology and tried to keep up as best I could, but that’s what the recorded video archive is for, right? It’s no surprise that Juniper is pitching QFabric as a solution for the converged data center, just like their competitors are pitching their own fabric solutions. It just reminds me that I need to spend some more time studying these fabric systems. Also, you can see here where the demo gremlins bit the Juniper folks. It seemed to happen to everyone this time around. The discussion, especially from Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) did a great job of filling the time where the demo gremlins were having their fun.
The second presentation was over Virtual Chassis, Juniper’s method of stacking switches together to unify control planes and create managment simplicity. The idea is to take a group of switches and interconnect the backplanes to create high throughput while maintaining the ability to program them quickly. The technology is kind of interesting, especially when you extend it toward something like QFabric to create a miniature version of the large fabric deployment. However, here is where I get to the bad guy a bit… Juniper, while this technology is quite compelling, the presentation fell a bit flat. I know that Tech Field Day has a reputation for chewing up presenters. I know that some sponsors are afraid that if they don’t have someone technical in front of the group that bedlam and chaos will erupt. That being said, make sure that the presenter is engaging as well as technical. I have nothing but respect for the presenter and I’m sure he’s doing amazing things with the technology. I just don’t think he felt all the comfortable in front of our group talking about it. I know how nervous you can be during a presentation. Little things like demo failures can throw you off your game. But in the end, a bad presentation can be saved by a good presenter. A good presentation can take a hit from a less-than-ideal presenter. Virtual chassis is a huge talking point for me. Not only because it’s the way that the majority of my customers will interconnect their devices. Not because it’s a non-proprietary connector way to interconnect switches. It’s because Virtual Chassis is the foundation for some exciting things (that may or may not be public knowledge) around fabrics that I can’t wait to see.
Up next was Kyle Adams with Mykonos. They are a new acquistion by Juniper in the security arena. They have developed a software platform that provides a solution to the problem of web application security. Mykonos acts like a reverse proxy in front of your web servers. When it’s installed, it intercepts all of the traffic traveling to your Internet-facing servers and injects a bit of forbidden fruit to catch hackers. Things like fake debug codes, hidden text fields, and even phantom configuration files. Mykonos calls these “tar pits” and they are designed to fool the bad guys into a trail of red herrings. Becauase all of the tar pit data is generated on the fly and injected into the HTTP session, no modification of the existing servers is necessary. That is the piece that had eluded my understanding up until this point. I always thought Mykonos integrated into your infrastructure and sprayed fake data all over your web servers in the hope of catching people trying to footprint your network. Realizing now that it does this instead from the network level, it interesting to see the approaches that Mykonos can take. The tar pit data is practically invisible to the end user. Only those that are snooping for less-than-honorable intentions may even notice it. But once they take the bait and start digging a bit deeper, that’s when Mykonos has them. The software then creates a “super cookie” on the system as a method of identifying the attacker. These super coookes are suprisingly resilient, using combinations of Java and Flash and other stuff to stay persistent even if the original cookie is deleted. Services like Hulu and Netflix use them to better identify customers. Mykonos uses them to tie attacker sessions together and collect data. There are some privacy concerns naturally, but that is a discussion for a different day. Once Mykonos has tagged you, that’s when the countermeasures can start getting implemented.
I loved watching this in demo form. Mykonos randomly selects a response based on threat level and deploys it in an effort to prevent the attacker from compromising things. Using methods such as escalting network latency back to the attacker or creating fake .htacess files with convincingly encrypted usernames and passwords, Mykonos sets the hook to reel in the big fish. While the attacker is churning through data and trying to compromise what he thinks is a legitimate security hole, Mykonos is collecting data the whole time to later identify the user. That way, they can either be blocked from accessing your site or perhaps even prosecuted if desired. I loved the peek at Mykonos. I can see why Christofer Hoff (@beaker) was so excited to bring them on board. This refreshing approach to web application firewalls is just crazy enough to work well. As I said on the video, Mykonos is the ultimate way to troll attackers.
The final presentation at Juniper once again starred Derick Winkworth along with Dan Backman. Dan had presented over workflow automation at NFD2. Today, they wanted to talk about the same topic from a slightly different perspective. Derick took the helm this time and started off with a hilarious description of the land of milk and honey and unicorns, which according to him was representitive of what happens when you can have a comfortable level of workflow automation. It’s also where the title of this post came from. As you can tell from the video, this was the best part of having a former delegate presenting to us. He knew just how to keep us in stitches with all his whiteboarding and descriptions. After I was done almost spitting my refreshments all over my laptop, he moved on to his only “slide”, which was actually a Visio diagram. I suppose this means that Derick has entered the Hall Of Slideless TFD Presenters. His approach to workflow automation actually got me a bit excited. He talked less about scripting commands or automating configuration tasks and instead talked about all the disparate systems out there and how the lack of communication between them can cause the silo effect present in many organizations to amplify. I like Derick’s approach to using Junos to pull information in from various different sources to help expedite things like troubleshooting or process execution. Leveraging other utilities like curl helps standardize the whole shooing match without reinventing the wheel. If I can use the same utilities that I’ve always used, all my existing knowledge doesn’t become invalidated or replaced. That really speaks to me. Don’t make me unlearn everything. Give me the ability to take your product and use additional tools to do amazing things. That, to me, is the essence of SDN.
If you’d like to learn more about the various Juniper products listed above, be sure to visit their website at http://www.juniper.net. You can also follow their main Twitter account as @JuniperNetworks.
Tom’s Take
Juniper’s doing some neat things from what they showed us at NFD4. They appear to be focusing on fabric technology, both from the QFabric converged networking overview and even the Virtual Chassis discussion. Of course, protecting things is of the utmost importance, so Mykonos can prevent the bad guys from getting the goods in a very novel way. Uniting all of this is Junos, the single OS that has all kinds of capabilities around SDN and now OpenFlow 1.3. Sure, the demo gremlins hit them a couple of times, but they were able to keep the conversation going for the most part and present some really compelling use cases for their plans. The key for Juniper is to get the word out about all their technology and quit putting up walls that try and “hide” the inner workings of things. Geeks really like seeing all the parts and pieces work. Geeks feel a lot more comfortable knowing the ins and outs of a process. That will end up winning more converts in the long run than anything else.
Tech Field Day Disclaimer
Juniper was a sponsor of Network Field Day 4. As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 4. In addition, Juniper provided me with a hooded sweatshirt with the Juniper logo and some “I Wish This Ran Junos” stickers. They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.
The first presentation of the final day of Network Field Day 4 brought us to the mothership on Tasman Drive. The Cisco Borderless team had a lineup of eleven different presenters ready to show us everything they had. For those of you not familar with the term, Borderless Networks inside Cisco essentially means “everything that isn’t data center or voice.” Yeah, that means routing and switching and security and wireless and everything else. That also meant that we got a very diverse group of people presenting to us and a lot of short twenty minute videos of their products. In a way, it’s very much like speed dating. With little time to get the point across, you tend to shed the unnecessary pleasantries and get right to the important stuff.
First up was the UCS team with new E-series servers. These are blades that are designed to slide into a ISR G2 router and provide a full-featured x86 platform. It’s a great idea in search of an application. I can still remember the AxP modules and how they were going to change my life. That never really materialized. The payoff use case that you are looking for is the second video above. Cisco is starting to push for the idea that you can contain a whole branch office in a single router and run not only the phone system and networking routing and VPN, but now a light-duty server as well. I’m not sure how many people will be looking to do that with virtualized server resources residing in the data center, but there was some discussion of using this a temporary failover type of environment to push the branch server to the edge in the event of some kind of disaster or outage. That might work better to me that running the entire branch on the router. Of course, as you can tell, the demo gremlins found Cisco as well.
The next presentation was the new darling Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v. This little gem got some face time on stage with John Chambers at Cisco Live this year. It’s a totally virtualized router (hence the “v”) that can move workloads into the cloud when needed. I’m really curious as to why this is included with Borderless, as this is a very data center specific play right now. I know that Cisco is pushing this device currently as a VPN concentrator or MPLS endpoint for WAN aggregation. It makes more sense from some of their diagrams to have it running inside a cloud provider network carving up user space. I’m going to keep an eye on this one to see where the development goes.
Now, we get to something fun. Cisco FlexVPN is what happens when someone finally took a look at all the different methods for configuring VPNs on the various Cisco devices and said “WTF?!?” FlexVPN utilizes IKEv2 to help speed configuration. You can watch the short video and see all the stuff that we have to deal with to configure a VPN today. Cisco finally took our complaints to heart and made things a lot more simple. Of course there are drawbacks, and with FlexVPN that means it only works with IKEv2. There’s no backwards compatibility. Of course, if you’re going to have to be migrating everything anyway, you might as well make a clean break and rebuild it right. That’s going to make things like hub-and-spoke VPN configuration a whole lot less painful in the near future. Props to Cisco for fixing a pain point for us.
Okay, so maybe a I lied just a bit. Since Cisco Unified Border Element runs on a router (even though it’s technically voice), we got a presentation about it! I was in hog heaven here. If you are looking at deploying a SIP trunk, you had better be looking at a CUBE box to handle the handoff. Don’t think, just do it. Listen to the voice of Amy Arnold (@amyengineer) and Erik Peterson (@ucgod). You need this. You just don’t know how much until you start banging your head against a wall.
More Voice!!! By this point, I was practically crying tears of joy. Two voice presentations in one day. At a networking event no less! This presentation on enhanced SRST shows how big of kludge SRST really is. I’m not a huge fan of it, but I have to configure it to be sure that the phone systems work correctly in the event of a WAN outage. It’s all still CLI and very annoying to configure and keep in sync. Thankfully, with the ESRST manager highlighted in the video above, we can keep those configurations in sync and even have it automagically pull the necessary configurations out of CUCM. This software runs on a Service Engine right now in the router, but I can’t wait to see if Cisco ports it to a virtual setup to run under a CUCMBE 6000 server or even on a UCS-E blade down the road. Anything that I can do to make SRST less painful is a welcome change.
Okay, this had to be one of the more interesting presentations I’ve been involved in at an NFD event. We got our AppNav presentation over Webex from a remote resource. I know this a hot thing to do at Cisco offices to make sure we have the most talented people giving us the most up-to-date info about a particular subject. However, I expect this when I’m in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, not at the mothership in San Jose. The Webex cut out now and then and there were times when we had to strain to hear what was being said in the room. Looking back at the video, I marvel that the room mikes picked up as much as they did. As for AppNav itself, it’s a virtual DC version of the Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). My grasp of WAN acceleration isn’t as good as it should be, even from Infineta back at NFD3. There’s some good info in here I’m sure. I’m just going to have to go back and digest it to see where it fits into my needs.
Now it’s time for some switching talk. We got a roadmap on the Catalyst line. There are some interesting tidbits in the slides, such as a monster 9000W power supply for the 4500 to support UPoE (more on that in a minute). The 4500 is also going to get VSS support and ISSU support. Those two things alone are going to make me start considering the use of the 4500 in the core of most of my smaller networks. The fixed configuration Catalyst switches also have some nice roadmaps, including UPoE support and lots of IPv6 enhancements. As I move forward in 2013, I’m planning on doing a lot with IPv6, so knowing that I’m going to have switching support behind me is a nice comfort. Of all the updates, the most talked about one was probably the Catalyst 6500. A switch that has been rumored to be on the chopping block for many years now, the venerable Cat6K is getting more updates, including FabricPath support and 100Gig module support. I think this switch may outlast my networking career at this rate. There are lots of rumors as to why Cisco is renovating this campus core stalwart once more, but it’s clear that they are attempting to squeeze as much life out of it as they can right now. To me, the idea of stretching FabricPath down into the campus presents some very tantalizing opportunities to finally get rid of spanning tree on all but the user-facing links. Let’s hope that the Cat6k sticks around long enough to get a gold watch and a nice pension for all the work it’s given us over the years.
Our next discussion was around security and using Cisco TrustSec to do things a little differently that we’re used to. By now, I think everyone has talked your ear off about BYOD. Even I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s a real issue for people in the dark security caves because our traditional methods of access lists and so forth don’t work the same way when you’ve got employees bringing their own laptops or asking you to give them access to data from tablets or phones. What this has morphed into is a need to do more role-based authorization. That’s what TrustSec means to me. Of course, a lot of previous attempts to do this, like NAC, haven’t really hit the mark or have been so convoluted that it was almost impossible to get them working correctly. Today, Cisco has rolled all the functionality of NAC and ACS into the Identity Services Engine (ISE). I’ve had a very brief encounter with ISE, so I know it has a lot of potential. I want to see how Cisco will incorporate it into the bigger TrustSec picture to make everything work across my various platforms.
Time to turn up the juice. Cisco brought out Universal Power over Ethernet (UPoE), which is their solution to pump up to 60 watts of power across a standard Ethernet cable to power…well, whatever it is that eats 60w of power. Cisco’s doing this by taking 802.3at PoE+, which can pump 30w down the cable, and pushing an additional 30w of power down the other unused pairs. Interestingly, Cisco talked to the people behind the ISO and EIA/TIA standards and found that when you have a bunch of unstructured cables running about around 50 watts (which is the 60w number above minus cable loss), you get a temperature in the cable bundle about 8-10 degrees above the ambient room temperature. In reality, this means that 60w is the max amount of power you’re likely to ever get out of a Cat5e cable unless you chill it or have some kind of new material that can reduce the heating effect. Cisco seems to be targeting UPoE to drive things like monitors, thin client desktops, and even those crazy command center touch pads that you see littered across the floor of a trading house or stock exchange. This last item really makes me believe that UPoE is going to be positioned in the same vein as the ultra-low latency Nexus 3548 – financial markets. Thin clients and command center touch panels are likely to be the kind of mission-critical devices these companies are willing to pay big buck to power. With the above-mentioned 9000w PS for the Catalyst 4500, you can see why we’re going to soon need to put a nuclear reactor in to drive these things.
Cisco Smart Operations dropped by to talk to us about Cisco Smart Install. This is the feature that I tend to turn off when I see it by the telltale sign of “Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/network-config.” The Smart Operations team is doing its best to create an environment where an IT department that doesn’t have the headcount to send technicians to deploy remote site switches can leverage software tools to have those devices auto-provision themselves. You can also configure them to automatically configure things like Smartport roles, which has never really been one of my favorite switch features. Overall, I can appreciate where Cisco is wanting to go with this technology. But, as a CLI jockey, I’m still a bit jaded when it comes to having part of my job replaced by a TFTP script.
The final Cisco NFD4 presentation was about application visibility and control. This is a lot of the intelligence that is built into the Cisco Prime monitoring software that was demoed for us back at NFD3. If you can identify the particular fingerprints of a given application, such as Telepresence, you can better determine when those fingerprints are out of whack. I’m also excited because fingerprinting apps is going to be a huge part of security in the near future, as evidenced by Palo Alto’s app-based firewall and the others like Sonicwall and Watchguard that have followed along. Even the Cisco ASA-CX is starting to come around to the idea of stopping apps and not protocols.
There you have it. Lots of presenters. Hours of video. A couple of thousand words from me on all of it. It’s almost exhausting to see that much information in a short span of time. Some of the things that Cisco did with this presentation were great. There were technologies that only needed a bit of time. There were others that we could have spent an hour or more on. I think that the next NFD presenters that want to try something along these lines should setup the first three hours with rapid fire presentations and reserve the last hour for us to call back to earlier presenters and hit them with additional questions. That way, we don’t run out of time and we get to talk about the things that interest us the most. Bravo overall to the Cisco Borderless team for breaking out of the mold and trying something new to keep the NFD delegates hooked in.
Tech Field Day Disclaimer
Cisco was a sponsor of Network Field Day 4. As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 4. In addition, they provided me with an 8GB USB drive with marketing collateral and data sheets. They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.
Brocade kicked off our first double session at Network Field Day 4. We’d seen them previously at Network Field Day 2 and I’d just been to Brocade’s headquarters for their Tech Day a few weeks before. I was pretty sure that the discussion that was about to take place was going to revolve around OpenFlow and some of the hot new hardware the Brocade had been showing off recently. Thankfully, Lisa Caywood (@TheRealLisaC) still has some tricks up her sleeve.
I hereby dub Lisa “Queen of the Mercifully Short Introduction.” Lisa’s overview of Brocade hit all the high points about what Brocade’s business lines revolve around. I think by now that most people know that Brocade acquired Foundry for their ethernet switching line to add to their existing storage business that revolves around Fibre Channel. With all that out of the way, it was time to launch into the presentations.
Jessica Koh was up first to talk to me about a technology that I haven’t seen already – HyperEdge. This really speaks to me because the majority of my customer base isn’t ever going to touch a VDX or and ADX or an MLXe. HyperEdge technology is Brocade’s drive to keep the campus network infrastructure humming along to keep pace with the explosion of connectivity in the data center. Add in the fact that you’ve got all manner of things connecting into the campus network, and you can see how things like manageability can be at the forefront of people’s minds. To that end, Brocade is starting off the HyperEdge discussion early next year with the ability to stack dissimilar ICX switches together. This may sound like crazy talk to those of you that are used to stacking together Cisco 3750s or 2960s. On those platforms, every switch has to be identical. With the HyperEdge stacking, you can take an ICX 6610 and stack it with an ICX 6450 and it all works just fine. In addition, you can place a layer 3 capable switch into the stack in order to provide a device that will get your packets off the local subnet. That is a very nice feature that allows the customer base to buy layer 2 today if needed then add on in the future when they’ve outgrown the single wiring closet or single VLAN. Once you’ve added the layer 3 switch to the stack, all those features are populated across all the ports of the whole stack. That helps to get rid of some of the idiosyncrasies of some of the first stacking switch configurations, like not being able to locally switch packets. Add in the fact that the stacking interfaces on these switches are the integrated 10Gig Ethernet ports, and you can see why I’m kind of excited. No overpriced stacking kits. Standard SFP+ interfaces that can be reused in the event I need to break the stack apart.
I’m putting this demo video up to show how a demo during your presentation can be both a boon and a bane. Clear you cache after you’re done or log in as a different user to be sure you’re getting a clean experience. The demo can be a really painful part when it doesn’t run correctly.
Kelvin Franklin was up next with an overview of VCS, Brocade’s fabric solution. This is mostly review material from my Tech Day briefing, but there are some highlights here. Firstly, Brocade is using yet a third new definition for the word “trunk”. Unlike Cisco and HP, Brocade refers to the multipath connections into a VCS fabric as a trunk. Now, a trunk isn’t a trunk isn’t a trunk. You just have to remember the context of which vendor you’re talking about. This was also the genesis of packet spraying, which I’m sure was a very apt description for what Brocade’s VCS is doing to the packets as they send them out of the bundled links but it doesn’t sound all that appealing. Another thing to keep in mind when looking at VCS is that it is heavily based on TRILL for the layer 2 interconnects, but it does use FSPF from Brocade’s heavy fibre channel background to handle the routing of the links instead of IS-IS as the TRILL standard calls for. Check out Ivan’s post from last year as to why that’s both good and bad. Brocade also takes time to call out the fact that they’ve done their own ASIC in the new VCS switches as opposed to using merchant silicon like many other competitors. Only time will tell how effective the move to merchant silicon will be for those that choose to use it, but so long as Brocade can continue to drive higher performance from custom silicon it may be an advantage for them.
This last part of the VCS presentation covers some of the real world use cases for fabrics and how Brocade is taking an incremental approach to building fabrics. I’m curious to see how the VCS will begin to co-mingle with the HyperEdge strategy down the road. Cisco has committed to bringing their fabric protocol (FabricPath) to the campus in the Catalyst 6500 in the near future. With all the advantages of VCS that Brocade has discussed, I would like to see it extending down into the campus as well. That would be a huge advantage for some of my customers that need the capability to do a lot of east-west traffic flows without the money to invest in the larger VCS infrastructure until their data usage can provide adequate capital. There may not be a lot that comes out of it in the long run, but even having the option to integrate the two would be a feather in the marketing cap.
After lunch and a short OpenStack demo, we got an overview of Brocade’s involvement with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) from Curt Beckmann. I’m not going to say a lot about this video, but you really do need to watch it if you are at all curious to see where Brocade is going with their involvement with OpenFlow going forward. As you’ve no doubt heard before, OpenFlow is really driving the future of networking and how we think about managing data flows. Seeing what Brocade is doing to implement ideas and driving direction of ONF development is nice because it’s almost like a crystal ball of networking’s future.
The last two videos really go together to illustrate how Brocade is taking OpenFlow and adopting it into their model for software defined networking (SDN). By now, I’ve heard almost every imaginable definition of SDN support. On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Cisco and Juniper. A lot of their value is tied up in their software. IOS and Junos represent huge investments for them. Getting rid of this software so the hardware can be controlled by a server somewhere isn’t the best solution as they see it. Their response has been to open APIs into their software and allow programmability into their existing structures. You can use software to drive your networking, but you’re going to do it our way. At the other extreme end of the scale, you’ve got NEC. As I’ve said before, NEC is doubling down on OpenFlow mainly for one reason – survival. If they don’t adapt their hardware to be fully OpenFlow compliant, they run the risk of being swept off the table by the larger vendors. Their attachment to their switch OS isn’t as important as making their hardware play nice with everyone else. In the middle, you’ve got Brocade. They’ve made some significant investments into their switch software and protocols like VCS. However, they aren’t married to the idea of their OS being the be all, end all of the conversation. What they do want, however, is Brocade equipment in place that can take advantage of all the additional features offered from areas that aren’t necessarily OpenFlow specific. I think their idea around OpenFlow is to push the hybrid model, where you can use a relatively inexpensive Brocade switch to fulfill your OpenFlow needs while at the same time allowing for that switch to perform some additional functionality above and beyond that defined by the ONF when it comes to VCS or other proprietary software. They aren’t doing it for the reasons of survival like NEC, but it offers them the kind of flexibility they need to get within striking distance of the bigger players in the market.
If you’d like to learn more about Brocade, you can check out their website at http://www.brocade.com. You can also follow them on Twitter as @BRCDComm.
Tom’s Take
I’ve seen a lot of Brocade in the last couple of months. I’ve gotten a peek at their strategies and had some good conversations with some really smart people. I feel pretty comfortable understanding where Brocade is going with their Ethernet business. Yes, whenever you mention them you still get questions about fibre channel and storage connectivity, but Brocade really is doing what they can to get the word out about that other kind of networking that they do. From the big iron of the VDX to the ability to stack the ICX switches all the way to the planning in the ONF to run OpenFlow on everything they can, Brocade seems to have started looking at the long-term play in the data networking market. Yes, they may not be falling all over themselves to go to war with Cisco or even HP right now. However, a bit of visionary thinking can lead one to be standing on the platform when the train comes rumbling down the track. That train probably has a whistle that sounds an awful lot like “OpenFlow,” so only time can tell who’s going to be riding on it and who’s going to be underneath it.
Tech Field Day Disclaimer
Brocade was a sponsor of Network Field Day 4. As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 4. In addition, Brocade provided me with a gift bag containing a 2GB USB stick with marketing information and a portable cell phone charger. They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.
Day two of Network Field Day 4 kicked off with a visit to Spirent. I was fairly impressed with their testing setup the last time and I wanted to see what new tricks they had in store for us this time around. After a quick breakfast, we settled in for our first session. Although this one wasn’t broadcast, we did get permission to talk about what they were showing us. One of the issues that Spirent has with their setup is that it’s just so…huge. While it is very accurate and can take just about everything you can throw at it, it’s not exactly the most convenient thing to haul around when you need to test something. To that end, Spirent is looking a releasing a more compact unit that’s more in line with the needs of an enterprise testing setup. The unit we saw was about the size of a desktop computer case, but Spirent says the final goal is to have a unit that’s about 1U in size and can be placed in a rack. That way, you can grab the tester when you need to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it’s not the network (or the WAN connection or anything else Spirent can test). Do remember that having a smaller version of the until does come with a compromise or two. The most apparent one is the reduction in testing resolution from the nanseconds of the big Spirent setup down to a few milliseconds on the enterprise version. Truth be told, you probably don’t need the nanosecond resolution of something like a QFabric test when you’re just trying to test an enterprise network. If a few milliseconds really does matter, then maybe you need to look into the bigger unit. One of the other things that interested me about their new unit was the interface of the software itself. Spirent has gone all out to make sure that it’s easy to start a test and set the parameters. The metaphor that they are using is that of a media player. You can drag sliders to vary the size and number of packets as well as setting other parameters. When you’re ready to go, just press the oversized Play button and your test kicks off and runs until completion. You’ll see a bit of this interface in a bit.
When we picked up the stream again, I got a bit excited. Spirent has taken everything they know about testing and applied it to some interesting use cases. No one can deny that we’ve entered a new phase of cyber warfare. First, it was the kids doing thing for fun and reputation. Then it was the career bad guys doing it for money. Now we find ourselves dealing with advanced malware threats and state-sposored cyberterrorism. After some discussion about social engineering and other topics, we started talking about Spirent applying their testing methodologies to find vulnerabilities and alert you to them before they can be exploited. Spirent has a huge library of thousands of tests that can be run against a multitude of applications on just about any OS platform, from Windows to iOS.
It’s demo time again! Spirent fired up a demo environment running Linux and exploited a Jabber server with a bunch of attack traffic. You can tell that this was a fairly thorough attack, as they went through several iterations before they finally found a vector. Other tools that I’ve used just attack known holes and give up after one or two iterations. Spirent has created a tool that can not only iterate on different surfaces, but you can also craft your own tests to take advantage of zero-day exploits in the wild. That makes me a little more confident with their results, as they don’t quit until the test is finished.
Last up was Ameya Barvé with an overview of the new iTest Lab Optimizer. According to Ameya, one of pains of lab operations involves the lack of automation. You never know who’s in the lab or who’s reconfigured it to support some wacky sidebar case. iTest Lab Optimizer takes care of many of these problems by creating a system for lab reservation and topology creation. By utilizing a layer 1 switch to interconnect the devices in the lab, you can use iTest to overlay the lab topology on top of it on the fly. I can see the allure of having this kind of capability in a larger lab environment, and should my lab ever grow to the point where it’s not a collection of cables assembled on a side table in my office, I’m sure having a software program like this would be a great boon to speed test setup and execution.
Spirent has some amazing testing gear. I’ve said as much previously. What they’ve done since our last meeting is take what they have and shrink it down to the point where it makes cost-effective sense to the rest of the world not needing to test high-end network gear day in and day out. The newer portable testing suite should appeal those people in the data center or service provider area that have SLAs that need to be met or constantly find themselves getting into arguments over performance numbers. The rest of their presentation seemed to be an outgrowth of their testing strategies. For instance, the zero-day cyberwarfare testing suite shows that they can apply the methodology of executing in-depth tests to a different market that requires a specific kind of results. That shows me that someone inside Spirent is thinking outside the small little niche. The new iTest software shows me that Spirent is trying to recognize a pain point that many of us weren’t sure could even be addressed. It also tells me that Spirent isn’t just a one-trick pony and that we should expect to see more good things from them in the near future.
Tech Field Day Disclaimer
Spirent was a sponsor of Network Field Day 4. As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 4. In addition, they provided me with a gift bag containing a coffee mug, a pen, and a golfing tool of some sort. They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.
Presenter number two at Network Field Day 4 was Opengear. This was a company that I hadn’t heard much about. A cursory glance at their website reveals that they make console servers among other interesting management devices. Further searching turned up a post by Jeremy Stretch over at Packetlife about using one of the devices as the core of his free community lab. If it’s good enough for Stretch, it’s good enough to pique my interest.
As you can see from the short opening, Opengear is dedicated to making network infrastructure management equipment like console servers as well as PDU management and environmental sensors. Most interesting to me was the ACM5004-G unit the delegates received, which is a 4-port model with a 3G radio uplink. They also make much more dense devices like the one in Stretch’s lab for those that are wanting something with a few more ports. Most of the people I know that are looking at something like this for the CCIE lab use an old 2511 router with octal cables. Those are fairly cheap on eBay but you are taking a risk with the hardware finally wearing out and being out of warranty. As well, there are a ton of features that you can configure in the Opengear software (we’ll get to that in a minute.
Up next…is a caution for Opengear and other would-be Tech Field Day presenters. Yes, I understand you are proud of your customer base and want to tell the world about all the cool people that use your product. That being said, a single slide crammed full of logos, which I affectionately call “The NASCAR Slide” may be a better idea that slide after slide of each company broken down by industry vertical. You have to think to yourself that filling 8-10 slides of your deck with other people’s logos is not only wasting time and space, but not doing a very good job of telling us what your product does. All of the companies on that list probably use toilet paper as well, but we don’t see that on your slides. Better to focus on your product.
Okay, now for awesome time. Opengear’s management software has a bunch of bells and whistles to suit your fancy. You can configure all manner things like multiple authentication methods for your users to prevent them from accessing consoles they aren’t supposed to see. As the underpinnings of the whole Opengear system run on Linux, it’s no surprise that their monitoring software is built on top of Nagios. This allows you to use their VCMS product to manage multiple disparate units. Think about that. You’re using the Opengear boxes to manage your equipment. Now you can use their software to manage your Opengear boxes. Those units can also be configured to “call home” over secured VPNs to ensure that your traffic isn’t flying across the Internet unencrypted. VCMS can also use vendor-neutral commands to manage connected UPSes. I can’t tell you the number of times having a device that could power cycle a UPS or PDU would have saved my bacon or prevented a trip across the state. The VCMS can even script responses to events, such as triggering a power cycle if the system is hung or stops responding.
Next up is a demo of the software. Worth a look if your interested in the gory details of the interface:
We finished off the day with a talk about some of the new and interesting things that Opengear is doing with their devices. I think the story about configuring them to use a webcam to take pictures of people opening roadside boxes then upload the pictures to an FTP server running on the Opengear box that then sends the picture over 3G back to central location was the most interesting. Of course, everyone immediately seized on the salmon farm as the strangest use case. It’s clear that Opengear has a great solution that is only really limited by your imagination.
If you’d like to learn more about Opengear and their variety of products, you can check out their website at http://opengear.com. You can also follow them on Twitter as @Opengear.
Tom’s Take
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve needed a console server. Just that functionality alone would save me a lot of pain in some remote deployments I’ve had. Opengear seems to have taken this idea and ran with it by adding on some great additional functionality, whether it be cellular uplinks or software controls for all manner of third party UPSes. I think the fact that you can do so much with their boxes with a little imagination and some elbow grease means that we’re going to be hearing stories like the fish farm for a while to come.
Tech Field Day Disclaimer
Opengear was a sponsor of Network Field Day 4. As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 4. In addition, Opengear provided me with an ACM5004-G console server and a polo shirt. They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.
The first presenter at Network Field Day 4 came to us from another time and place. Stewart Reed came to us all the way from Brisbane, Australia to talk to us about his network monitoring software from Statseeker. I’ve seen Statseeker before at Cisco Live and you likely have too if you been. They’re the group that always gives away a Statseeker-themed Mini on the show floor. They’ve also recently done a podcast with the Packet Pushers.
We got into the room with Stewart and he gave us a great overview of who Statseeker is and what they do:
He’s a great presenter and really hits on the points that differentiates Statseeker. I was amazed by the fact that they said they can keep historical data for a very long period of time. I’ve managed to crash a network monitoring system years ago by trying to monitor too many switch ports. Keeping up with all that information was like drinking from a firehose. Trying to keep that data for long periods of time was a fantasy. Statseeker, on the other hand, has managed to find a way to not only keep up with all that information but keep it around for later use. Stewart said one of my new favorite quotes during the presentation, “Whoever has the best notes wins.” Not only do they have notes that go back for a long time, but their notes don’t suffer from averaging abstraction. When most systems say that they keep data for long periods of time, what they really mean is that they keep the 15 or 30 minute average data for a while. I’ve even seen some go to day or week data points in order to reduce the amount of stored data. Statseeker takes one minute data polls and keeps those one minute data polls for the life of the data. I can drill into the interface specs at 8:37 on June 10th, 2008 if I want. Do you think anyone really wants to argue with someone that keeps notes like that?
Of course, what would Network Field Day be without questions:
One of the big things that comes right out in this discussion is the idea that Statseeker doesn’t allow for customer SNMP monitoring. By restricting the number of OIDs that can be monitored to a smaller subset, this allows for the large-scale port monitoring and long term data storage that Statseeker can provide. I mean, when you get right down to it, how many times have you had to write your own custom SNMP query for an odd OID? The majority of the customers that Statseeker are likely going to have something like 90% overlap in what they want to look at. Restricting the ability to get crazy with monitoring makes this product simple to install and easy to manage. At the risk of overusing a cliche, this is more in line with Apple model of restriction with focus on ease of use. Of course, if Statseeker wants to start referring to themselves as the Apple of Network Monitoring, by all means go right ahead.
The other piece from this second video that I liked was the mention that the minimum Statseeker license is 1000 units. Stewart admits that below that price point, it argument for Statseeker begins to break down somewhat. This kind of admission is refreshing in the networking world. You can’t be everything to everyone. By focusing on long term data storage and quick polling intervals, you obviously have to scale your system to hit a specific port count target. If you really want to push that same product down into an environment that only monitors around 200 ports, you are going to have to make some concessions. You also have to compete with smaller, cheaper tools like MRTG and Cacti. I love that they know where they compete best and don’t worry about trying to sell to everyone.
Of course, a live demo never hurts:
If you’d like to learn more about Statseeker, you can head over to their website at http://www.statseeker.com/. You can also follow them on Twitter as @statseeker. Be sure to tell them to change their avatar and tweet more. You can see hear about Statseeker’s presentation in the Packet Pushers Priority Queue Show 14.
Tom’s Take
Statseeker has some amazing data gathering capabilities. I personally have never needed to go back three years to win an argument about network performance, but knowing that I can is always nice. Add in the fact that I can monitor every port on the network and you can see the appeal. I don’t know if Statseeker really fits into the size of environment that I typically work in, but it’s nice to know that it’s there in case I need it. I expect to see some great things from them in the future and I might even put my name in the hat for the car at Cisco Live next year.
Statseeker was a sponsor of Network Field Day 4. As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 4. They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.
In the world of voice, not everything is wine and roses. As much as we might want to transition everything over to digital IP phones and soft clients, the fact remains that there are some analog devices that still need connectivity on a new phone system. The more common offender of this is the lowly fax machine. Yes, even in this day and age we still need to rely on the tried-and-true facsimile machine to send photostatic copies of documents across the PSTN to a waiting party. Never mind email or Dropbox or even carrier pigeon. Fax machines seem to be the most important device connected to a phone system. Normally, I leave the fax connections and their POTS lines intact without touching anything. However, there are times when I don’t have that luxury.
In the case of the Cisco VoIP systems, that means relying on the Analog Terminal Adapter, or ATA. The ATA allows you to connect an analog device to the unit, whether it be a fax machine or a cordless analog phone or even a fire alarm or postage machine. It has many uses. The configuration of the ATA is fairly straightforward under any CUCM system. However, if you have a multitude of analog devices that you need to connect, you might opt to use the second analog port on the ATA. The ATA 186 of the past and its current replacement, the ATA 187, both have 2 analog ports on the back. There’s only one Ethernet port, though. This is where the interesting part comes in to play. If there are two analog ports but only one Ethernet port, how to I configure the MAC address for the second port? All phone devices in CUCM must be identified by MAC address. On an ATA, the primary MAC address printed on the bottom or the side of the box is the address for the first port.
If you want to use the second port, you’re going to have to do a little bit of disassembly. Cisco uses a standard method to create a new MAC address:
1. Take the MAC address for port 1.For example, 00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF.
2. Drop the first two digits from the MAC address.In the example, 00:DE:AD:BE:EF.
3. Append “01” to the end of the 10-digit address.Example, 00:DE:AD:BE:EF:01.
Once you’ve completed those steps, take the MAC address you’ve just created and plug it into CUCM as a new ATA device. Once you’ve completed the necessary steps to create the new device, it will register with the DN you’ve assigned to it. Then you can start calling or faxing it to your heart’s content.
There’s no mention of the secondary MAC address anywhere on the web interface. You’d figure it wouldn’t be hard to write some HTML function to read the MAC address and do the above operation. The Cisco documentation buries this information deep inside the setup document. I’ve even search Cisco’s very own support forums and found all manner of advice that doesn’t work correctly. I decided that it was time to jot this information down in a handy place for the next time I need to remember how to configure the ATA’s second port. I hope you find it useful as well.
The Networking Nerd 