Cisco CCNA Voice Lab Topology

During this course we are going to learn and experiment with the most common Cisco Unified Communications Manager features. It is highly recommended to prepare your own lab and to follow the activities in the training. There is not so much theory here but the administration guide of the latest CUCM should cover and answer your questions if any. The full theory part is covered under the CCNA Voice training.

So, the following guide is completely based on Cisco Unified Communications Manager 9 but the topics covered here and the features explained are the same since the very first CUCM releases. However, we will not be wrong if we say that this guide can be used with the latest CUCM 10 and it will be a hundred percent valid cisco call manager.

For the purpose of the training we will use a very simple lab environment which is simulating a company infrastructure with HQ office and a branch office. The CUCM nodes are located in the HQ. Each branch has its own Voice Gateway (Cisco 3725). We are using GNS3 emulator to run our routers and later in the training you will find the configuration of the routers. The scenario is simple - both VGWs, responsible for each branch are simulating a connection to the Telco. With some tricks and workarounds we will be able to simulate dialling between the HQ and the Branch by using the external numbers of the phones.

Here is the schematic of the environment. It is not a problem if you cannot prepare a second CUCM node.

CUCM basics lab environment

Lab Prerequisites

You will have to dedicate 4GB of RAM, some CPU and HDD resources for each CUCM instance you are going to use.

Download, install and make yourself familiar with GNS3 software. You will need it to run your Voice Gateways on it. While we will provide you the config files, we cannot provide you the IOS used to emulate the routers. Of course the best option is to run everything on real hardware equipment and to build your local lab environment.

For the purpose of the training you will not need hardware phones. Instead of that you can use Cisco IP Communicator, VTGO Lite by IP Blue or any third party software SIP phone but G.729 codec support is a must.