Monday, May 17, 2010

Back from CVOICE Class

Last week I attended a Global Knowledge course CVOICE (passing the exam gets you a CCNA Voice, and it's also apart of the CCVP curriculum). Overall it was a pretty good class, and I had a great teacher (Patrick Le).

The class went over a lot of the basics, giving a broad overview of POTS telephony and VoIP. We started out going over the basics of POTS, and configuring T1 CAS and ISDN PRIs. We then moved onto analog phones (FXS ports) being transferred over an IP WAN using VoIP with H.323 and SIP signaling. Unfortunately we never moved onto VoIP phones in lab, but we were given lecture on how it works. The class then went quite a bit into translations and advanced dial-peers, which Patrick taught quite well. Towards the end of the class we went into COR Lists, and the basics of CUBE (unfortunately ran out of time to lab up CUBE).

My main dislikes about the class were lack of VoIP phone configurations, and the complete lack of Call Manager (a separate course[s], but still would have liked to have some minor hands on with it). Minus those missing components the class was a great overview of Cisco Telephony, I suppose it makes sense since this is the class for CCNA Voice. Definitely helped me out immensely since I have very little real world experience with VoIP and analog phone configurations on Cisco devices. I plan on taking the exam in the next week or so, my lab partner already took it and passed, so I feel pretty good about it since we were on a similar level.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

CCIE R&S and Voice OEQs

Some news about Cisco's OEQ section of the CCIE R&S and Voice Lab exams has just started circulating the blogs this morning. It appears that Cisco is removing them from the lab altogether. Comes as a relief to many because of their ambiguity and weight on the exam.

Not exactly surprising as not too long ago there was a bit of an uproar over Cisco's announcement that their 360 training program for CCIEs would give exam candidates a free pass to skip over that section. A bit of a scam I must say on Cisco's part, but at least their getting the point now. Questionable how well that section actually thwarted cheaters anyways.

Source: INE