Cisco announces the end-of-sale and end-of-life dates for the Cisco Catalyst 3750G, 3560G, 3750-E, and 3560-E Series Switches. The last day to order the affected product(s) is January 30, 2013. Customers with active service contracts will continue to receive support from the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) as shown in Table 1 of the EoL bulletin.

Table 1 describes the end-of-life milestones, definitions, and dates for the affected product(s). Table 2 lists the product part numbers affected by this announcement. For customers with active and paid service and support contracts, support will be available until the termination date of the contract, even if this date exceeds the Last Date of Support shown in Table 1.

Table 1. End-of-Life Milestones and Dates for the Cisco Catalyst 3750G, 3560G, 3750-E, and 3560-E Series Switches

Table 2. Product Part Numbers Affected by This Announcement

Chengdu, China - August 16, 2012 – Colasoft, an innovative provider of network analysis software and solutions, today announced a new version of its flagship product, nChronos back-in-time network analysis solution. Capability, customization and user experience are all enhanced in v3.1 which allow network administrators to easily complete back-in-time and real-time network analysis on high performance enterprise networks over a long period of time.

nChronos now delivers real-time network monitoring, key real-time traffic statistics and charts are available, such as throughput and top IP talkers. It helps maintain a productive enterprise network by providing visibility of the bandwidth usage. Besides, it provides long-term packet capturing and recording, you can zoom in any traffic anomaly which needs deeper investigation and rapidly find out the root to solve the problem. Now, 40-Day time window is available, much longer traffic trends can be displayed and analyzed.

“Our customers want to control both back-in-time and real-time network,” said Kang Lin, Vice President at Colasoft. “The new nChronos capability fulfills both of these needs, and unlike existing solutions in the market, we enable customers enjoy this without paying a high price for what is fundamentally a very simple software solution. It is more flexible.”

Also, alarm is the first line of defense for business networks. Alarm is critical for network administrators to instantly identify and resolve network problems. Practical alarms including email, domain and signature alarms are now available. Traffic anomaly alarm is also enhanced which enables you customize alarms with complicated thresholds to monitor network faults and abnormal activities.

The new nChronos also optimized user interface, security settings and activation mechanism which make a better user experience.

About nChronos

nChronos is a back-in-time network analysis server for high performance & critical enterprise networks including the following key features:

   - Back-in-time network analysis of historical traffic for forensics;

   - Benchmark and visualize trends of network performance;

   - 7x24 real-time network traffic capturing and recording;

   - Critical links monitoring & alerting;

   - In-depth network analysis for performance optimization;

   - Efficient drill-down for data-mining & index;

 The evaluation version is now available at Colasoft website www.colasoft.com.

Greece, 19th August, 2012

Firewall.cx, one of the world’s leading networking technology websites, announces its official collaboration with popular Colasoft, a company dedicated to the development of innovative network analysis software and solutions. Colasoft is a fast-growing company with more than half a million users in over 80 countries. Featured customers include IBM, Dell, Philips, Emerson, and other industry leading companies.

With this collaboration, Firewall.cx aims to provide its world-wide audience access to Colasoft’s popular and multi-awarded software applications covering network and packet analysis solutions.  

Colasoft’s products, including popular Capsa Free Network Analyser – Packet Sniffer, Capsa WiFi Network Analyser, nChronos back-in-time network analysis server and many more, will be made available through Firewall.cx’s free download sections and will also be used in upcoming packet analysis articles.

For more information about Colasoft, please visit http://www.colasoft.com.

Cisco Unity Express Module Configuration

Mentioned in Part-1 of our Cisco Unity Express installation article, the Cisco Unity Express setup procedure is identical for ISM-SRE-300-K9 and SM-SRE-700-K9 modules. We will be using the smaller ISM-SRE-300-K9 for this article. The only notable difference in the CallManager Express configuration will be the module’s interface that connects to CallManager Express.

For the SRE-300, the module’s interface name is interface ISM0/0, whereas for the SM-SRE-700 it is service-module sm2/0. Both interfaces are GigabitEthernet, connected via each router’s internal bus.

The ISM-SRE-300-K9 module is configured with its own IP address and acts as a separate machine inside the router. Before we can begin configuring Unity Express, preinstalled by Cisco, we must configure IP connectivity with the router so we can then access the ISM-SRE-300-K9 module and initialize the Unity Express setup.

When physically installing an SRE module, CCME will automatically make two additional interfaces available in its configuration. For the ISM-SRE-300-K9, they are interface ISM0/0 and interface ISM0/1, whereas for the SM-SRE-700 they are interface SM2/0 and interface SM2/1.

First step is to configure IP connectivity between the router (CCME) and Unity Express. This is achieved by configuring interface ISM0/0 with an IP address (ISM-SRE-300-K9) or interface SM2/0 for the SM-SRE-700.

Our CCME router has two IP addresses, 192.168.9.5/24 (Data VLAN) and 192.168.10.5/24 (Voice VLAN). When configuring an IP address on Unity Express, there is the choice of assigning one part of the existing network(s) (192.168.9.0 or 192.168.10.0) or one that is on a completely different network. 

It is a common practice to configure Unity Express with an IP address that is part of the Voice VLAN, that is, 192.168.10.0/24 in our example:

In the above configuration commands, we’ve configured our Unity Express module with IP address 192.168.10.10 and a default-gateway of 192.168.10.5 (CCME’s Voice VLAN IP address), this is because the Unity Express module is physically connected to our router’s internal interfaces (ISM) and therefore must use one of the router’s IP interfaces as a default-gateway.

The ip unnumbered <interface> command allows the Cisco Unity Express module to use a network subnet IP address associated with a specific router egress port such as GigabitEthernet0/0.2. This configuration method requires a static route to the service-engine interface. The router interface associated with the Cisco Unity Express interface (GigabitEthernet 0/0.2) must be in an "up" state at all times for communication between the router and module.

At this point we should note that GigabitEthernet0/0 is configured as a trunk link with our switch. This configuration method is known as ‘Router on a Stick’ and allows all configured VLANs to pass through a single interface. For more information on this configuration method, please refer to our Router-on-a-Stick article.

Following is the configuration of our GigabitEthernet 0/0 interface:

Next step is to create a static route to Unity Express’s IP address via the internal service module (ISM0/0):

At this point, we should be able to ping Unity Express’s IP address:

CallManager Express - Telephony-Service Configuration

Next step is to configure our CallManager Express web-based administrator user (if not already configured), voicemail extension on CallManager Express, voicemail dial-peer and Message Waiting Indicator (MWI) extensions used to enable/disable the red light (message waiting indicator) on the IP phone when there is a message waiting in the user’s voice mailbox:

Cisco Unity Express? Please Explain

Unity Express is a popular add-on for Cisco Unified Communication Manager Express (CallManager Express) and Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM), adding advanced auto attendant functionality with complex menu support through Unity Express voice scripts, user voice mail and advanced notification methods such as emailing voice messages directly to users, calling users to notify them about their new voice messages and much more.

Cisco Unity Express Hardware Platforms

Unity Express is offered on a variety of hardware platforms supporting the Cisco 2800, 3800, 2900 and 3900 series routers. Depending on the router and capacity required, Unity Express is available as a card that fits in an Advanced Integration Module (AIM) slot (2800, 3800 series), Internal Service Module (ISM) (2900, 3900 series), Network Module (NM-CUE-EC) for 3700, 2800 & 3800 series that support network modules, Enhanced Network Module (NME) for all 3700, 2800, 3800, and 2900, 3900 series routers supporting network modules and finally the newer Service Module (SM) supported only on ISRG2 routers (2900 and 3900 series), again that are able to accept network modules.

We were lucky to get our hands on two different Unity Express modules, the ISM-SRE-300-K9 installed on a Cisco 2911 CCME, and the larger SM-SRE-700-K9 installed into a Cisco 3945 CCME.

The following table shows the technical specifications of both ISM-SRE-300-K9 & SM-SRE-700-K9:

Meet The ISM-SRE-300-K9

While the configuration procedure for both modules is identical, physically there are many differences that cannot be overlooked.

The ISM-SRE-300 is the smallest internal module available for the newer ISRG2 routers but certainly does not hold back in performance or capabilities. With a whopping 100 mailbox support and up to 10 concurrent voice ports, its capable to deliver enterprise class services. 

As an ISM module, it is installed by opening the router’s lid and connecting it to the special ISM port located on the back left area of the main board or front right area, depending on which way the router is facing. On our Cisco 2911 ISR-G2 CallManager Express  router, we've marked the ISM connector in yellow: