CCIE Blog

OK, the wait is finally over for the upgrade we have been promising.

Before I even get into the main announcement, I thought I should bring something else small to your attention. We just made a large investment in our server farm infrastructure, and have increased server performance by a factor of almost 6 times! For instance, the CUCM CallManager Service Parameter’s web page used to take around 60 seconds to load.

It now takes 10.

Now, I’m really not trying to brag about our new capabilities, but this announcement is really exciting and extremely unmatched, so please be sure you read this thoroughly! ;-)

Quite frankly, after checking out the competitor’s offerings first hand, I can tell you that we are the only CCIE training vendor that can bring you any of the new features that I’m about to announce.

First off, one of our avid OSL_Voice posters, Jonathan Charles, made this comment and proceeded to ask this question over the weekend:

OK, the V3 Lab Blueprint has this statement:

The blueprint is a detailed outline of the topics likely to appear on
the lab exam. This blueprint introduces pre-configurations of basic
tasks (such as phone registration, basic application integration,
basic dial plan, etc.), in order to devote additional focus on expert
level skills (advanced configuration and troubleshooting) assessments.
As usual, knowledge of troubleshooting is an important skill and
candidates are expected to diagnose and solve issues as part of the
CCIE lab exam. The topics listed are guidelines and other relevant or
related topics may also appear.

The statement, “This blueprint introduces pre-configurations of basic
tasks (such as phone registration, basic application integration,
basic dial plan, etc.), in order to devote additional focus on expert
level skills” seems to indicate that the phone will be preconfigured
and registered and the dial plan may already be built…

Am I understanding this correctly?

Yes Jonathan, you are reading that correctly.

So what does it all mean? Well, quite simply put it means that depending on which lab you receive when you sit down to your actual CCIE Voice Lab Exam, you may have some phones that are pre-registered but not necessarily fully configured, you may have some basic app integration (e.g. Presence or UCCX might be integrated, maybe Unity Connections), maybe there is a basic Dial Plan in place (e.g. Basic CSS/PT infrastructure and/or basic Route Patterns configured). But look what is also contained in that statement, and also what follows directly afterward on Cisco’s v3 Blueprint webpage:

..in order to devote additional focus on expert level skills (advanced configuration and troubleshooting)

and then:

… As usual, knowledge of troubleshooting is an important skill and candidates are expected to diagnose and solve issues as part of the CCIE lab exam.

If you take the pre-configuration statement, along with the fact that not only in the above preface on statement about troubleshooting on the Cisco v3 blueprint page, but also the fact that every single one of the 13 sections contain the heading “Implement and Troubleshoot“, I’d say it is fairly clear that Cisco is going to have errors introduced into pre-configuration of your lab exam, before you sit down, that you are going to need to troubleshoot and correct (of course they will point you in a general direction to find the errors, and not simply leave you guessing as to what they are). Well if that is the case, then how are you going to practice those types of troubleshooting skills, if the errors are not already pre-loaded into your practice labs? Same thing with the advanced configurations – how are you going to be able to focus more on the advanced sections, leaving time to still finish your entire lab in a timely 8 hours, if your practice labs don’t already have those pre-configurations in them? I suppose you could put everything in yourself, but that takes a bit of your very valuable (and very limited) practice time, not to mention that, even if someone else wrote the practice lab, if you are forced to introduce the errors into your starting configuration yourself, they are going to be fairly easy to troubleshoot – don’t you think? – and thus not giving you even near adequate preparation for what you will face in the real CCIE Lab Exam.

So all of this, along with our experience in building, maintaining, renting, and getting user feedback and feature requests on our virtual Voice vRacks over the past 4 years is what formed the very impetus behind our long struggle to provide and perfect what we have come to offer on our v3 blueprint Voice vRacks: namely Proctor Labs Load Lab Configs feature.

Proctor Labs vRack: Load Lab Configs

Let’s dive into what is new about this feature. As we have mentioned before, this feature allows us as developers to not only pre-configure all router and switch devices with basic configs and errors for troubleshooting, but also allows us to have all of this pre-configured for you in every server used in any practice lab that we offer. NOTE: This does NOT mean that we have a “wiped clean CUCM server” (as some competitors have told me they are doing and that they think somehow compares to what we are doing – it’s not even close). This means that your CUCM Pub, Sub, CUPS, CUC and UCCX – ALL have DIFFERENT pre-configurations and DIFFERENT specific errors loaded onto them for EACH lab, before you begin said practice lab! So you may be working on a particular Mock Lab, let’s call it Mock Lab A, and maybe there are 5 errors for troubleshooting (few in QoS, few in DialPlan, etc), and some phones and gateways registered. Then later you may be working on, say Mock Lab B, and there are NEW errors pre-configured for you for this lab (maybe a few in CSS/PT, some problems with your GWs registering or sending calls to the PSTN, and maybe some basic CSS/PT/RPs are already there for you to use).

Loading these pre-configurations used to take around an hour for us to do, and admittedly, sometimes there were errors (hey – this is still CUCM, and it’s not exactly perfect in DB functions when hitting it hard in a lab environment). I mention that in case there are those that read this, that used this new feature on our vRacks as early adopters, and decided not to continue using it due to the long wait.

Well the wait is over.

They now load, error free, in under 3 minutes.

That’s everything, servers, routers, switches. New pre-configs, errors, everything, with proper DB replication working on CUCM Pub/Sub. Under 3 minutes.

On top of that – we did away with the “Show Status” button. We thought it too cumbersome to have to go back to another webpage to view the status of your routers and servers loading their basic configs. So we decided to put that status directly next to the device on the main vRack webpage. And of course in the screenshot below note that we offer not only T1/E1 PRI, but also T1/E1 CAS in the PSTN config, as well as the ability to enable SRST Mode for BR1 Router – all with simply the press of a button. One more new thing is that if you click on the Server name or IP Address, servers that should be HTTP’d into will launch a web page to that IP Address, while servers that should be RDP’d into (UCCX) will launch the RDP window.

Proctor Labs vRack: Router and Switch Status

One last thing, we previously mentioned that you were able to use your own hardware phones, not only for all of your practice labs, but also as your PSTN phone. However we limited this to only the Cisco 7960 model.

Limit removed. Use a 7960, 61, 62 or 65 model if you like. Simply choose the model before entering your MAC address and click Submit.

Proctor Labs vRack: PSTN Phone Type and MAC Address

So that’s it!

• 6X faster servers
• New PSTN Phone support
• New status directly on main vRack page
• … and most exciting, Load Lab Configs, that work everytime, in under 3 minutes!
• On all twenty-four of our new v3 Voice vRacks

Don’t you just love technology? Even if you don’t have a rack session at the moment, feel free to login to Proctor Labs using our demo account, and play around with the new features. We’re sure you’ll agree, there is nothing like this anywhere.

Happy labbing folks,

Mark