technology, networking and IP telephony
Posts tagged Cisco
Cisco and Nortel Interoperability Technical Configuration Guide
2November 25, 2009
Nortel has released another technical configuration guide geared towards interoperability between Cisco and Nortel equipment. The document covers a lot of information including EtherChannel to MLT interoperability, Spanning Tree interoperability, Nortel IP phones connecting to Cisco switches and Cisco IP phones connecting to Nortel switches.
It’s definitely well worth the time to review.
Cheers!
Which branch office VPN solution?
6November 20, 2009
I’m looking to replace the two aging Nortel 1700 VPN Routers (formerly Contivity). These VPN routers provide branch office tunnels to our remote offices, vendors and business affiliates. We utilize two VPN routers which are geographically disperse and connected to different tier 1 Internet Service Providers. This allows us to provide high availability and redundancy when used in conjunction with OSPF routing.
I’ve essentially boiled my options down to two possible solutions (vendors);
Juniper SRX 240
Cisco ASA 5550
So which do I choose and how to best evaluate the different products. The primary purpose of the device is to provide branch office IPSec tunnels. The product needs to support OSPF and it needs some limited support for Multicast over VPN.
This morning I was lucky enough to have one of our preferred vendors, who just happens to be a Juniper reseller, come on site and help setup 2 Juniper SRX 210 gateways for us to demo. I’ve never worked with a Junos based product and while the web based GUI was fairly straightforward the CLI interface is going to take some time to get use to. It’s not like Cisco, or Nortel or Brocade, or Blade Technologies. Thankfully I did find a quick start guide that helped get my feet wet with Junos.
Once I’m done with the Juniper SRX I’ll need to turn my attention to the Cisco ASA (Tom you know what I’ll be calling for soon – demo time).
I’ll post a summary once I have some thoughts about the Juniper SRX. Anyone care to comment regarding either the Juniper SRX or the Cisco ASA as it pertains to branch office VPN tunnels? As a note I’m already migrating our Nortel VPN end-users to our Juniper SSL VPN Secure Access 4000 appliances.
Cheers!
LLDP with Cisco 3750
25January 16, 2009
Nortel has released a Technical Configuration Guide designed to assist technical users configuring Nortel IP Phones connected to Cisco switches. The document makes specific references to the Cisco 3750 switch but the commands will apply to any Cisco switch that supports that specific feature.
I applaud Nortel for for making these Technical Configuration Guides available to users. It helps to broaden Nortel’s product reach and it empowers Nortel users to understand the different configuration options. I’d like to see Nortel get these documents indexed by Google or even there own internal Knowledgebase search engine.
In short you can use LLDP (802.1ab) on a Cisco 3750 to configure the Voice VLAN much the same way as you might on a Nortel ERS5520 switch using ADAC/LLDP. For those Cisco shops that are using Nortel Succession for voice this should be a welcome capability.
As in the past I’m going to post the document on my website;
http://www.michaelfmcnamara.com/files/ClientsInteropCisco_L2_1.1.pdf
As I’ve commented in the past it’s quite possible that Nortel may object to my “copying” of these documents. The goal is to make them readily available to Nortel users and allow them to be indexed by Google. I believe there are now quite a few Nortel corporate folks and engineers reading this blog, please contact me if you have concerns about me posting these documents.
Cheers!
