Exchange 2010 is a whole new beast if you are upgrading from Exchange 2003, but if you are upgrading from Exchange 2007 you will be aware of the some of the new features. In this article I will talk about some of the changes and some of the challenges that I had to work through when upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 in a production environment.
I have seen this topic as a difficult one so I wanted to write a little about it to explain the proper way to cable up a Cisco UCS Chassis to a Cisco 6120XP Fabric Interconnect. The Fabric Interconnect it crucial when setting up an Cisco UCS Chassis as it is what controls the chassis allows for proper failover and also acts as your connection back to the network and your fiber channel SAN.
When setting up Exchange 2010, migration from Exchange 2003, I noticed a lose in a very valuable functionality that most people will not pick up on. Once I migrated form Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 my users no longer had their “Display Name” showing up when they sent an External email, all the recipient would see is my Alias and email address. The reason I say most people would not notice this is because they hit reply to your email and send you a reply, I mean how many people actually look at what is displayed when you send an email. I will tell you who looks, spam filters. Internal email worked great as I would expect since it is never leaving the Exchange environment.
In Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Exchange introduced a feature that allows Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 clients to automatically map to any mailbox to which a user has Full Access permissions. If a user is granted Full Access permissions to another user’s mailbox or to a shared mailbox, Outlook automatically loads all mailboxes to which the user has full access.
Wireshark has a build in decoder and playing for RTP traffic encoded with the G.711 codec, however by default Wireshark cannot decode G.729 RTP traffic so that you can listen to it within Wireshark. Most SIP carriers sending your phone calls are going to be using G.729 codecs because it is much less bandwidth intensive so you can cram more calls down a smaller pipe. But if you want to listen to a VoIP call that was encoded with G.729 you will have to do a little massaging before it is playable. In this article I will show you how to extract the RTP traffic of the call and then convert it into a playable format for listening.
This article will describe how to take a 200+ Meg Wireshark capture of VoIP calls and filter out everything except the one call you want to review. It is very hard to analyze SIP and RTP of a 200+ MB Wireshark capture so it is very useful to be able to get ride of everything else except the call you want to analyze. It is understood that you have a basic familiarity with Wireshark and TShark as well as basic VoIP.
Everywhere I have ever worked has been a Dell, Cisco and Microsoft shop. We have used Dell for our servers, Cisco for our networking equipment and Microsoft for our OS and a lot of our other software. This is a common model among a lot of Medium to Large businesses but I truly feel that Cisco is changing that model to a Cisco and Microsoft shop with their UCS blade chassis. I didn’t know a whole lot about the UCS blade chassis until I was able to actually work with one and see what it was capable of. In this article below I will go over what Cisco UCS is, the benefits, and some of the problems.
Microsoft Direct Access comes into play, this new software that only works with Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate will allow remote users to be connected without having to launch a VPN client. If they have internet access they can connect to the business network. Additionally you can even run health checks against remote users laptops to make sure that they meet business security specifications before they are allowed to connect.
So I just threw a lot of information out there and you are probably saying “What?” or “WOW how does this work?” or maybe even “Is this secure?” Well I plan on covering all of that here shortly.
One problem I have always run into with Virtual machines on your personal computer as a test environment is that you can’t include the Cisco configs in the environment or even setup routing between VMs. Your VMs have to be on the same network to talk or you have to install an additional server as a “Routing and Remote Access” server. Well there is a way around this using GNS3 and VirtualBox together as if they were meant to work together. In this article I will explain how to setup your virtual network in GNS3 and then attach your Virtual Machines to it in VirtualBox. It really is very simple.
