Over 7 years ago, I started teaching classes at Global Knowledge. Many of you reading this blog, would like to have your own test environment to play with so you don’t blow up the production network. I invested in a home IP Telephony lab setup so I could keep up with changes and test options not in use at any of my customers. I will cover most of the facets of creating your own Cisco IP Telephony environment in this blog.

Consider whether you would like Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and/or Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express (CUCME) to be the central call processing device in your home-based Unified Communications deployment. This device will function as the brains of the operation. If you plan on eventually taking the Cisco Voice CCIE, you will probably want to incorporate both components. I’ll cover both in this and follow on blogs.

I decided to buy the following hardware for my network:

(2) Cisco 7960 IP Phones
(1) Linksys Switch
(1) Compaq DL320
(1) Gateway router

I purchased the Cisco 7960 IP Phones used on E-Bay. Although they were $300- each at the time, they came with AC power cords so I did not need the 3550-24T-PWR switch which was over my budget. The 3550-24T-PWR is a very affordable switch now that it is approaching end of life (EoL) status. The end of sale (EoS) announcement was made on the 3550 inline power switch a long time ago. If you decide to buy this switch, you should be aware that it only supports Cisco inline power (PoE) with a maximum of 10 watts per port. Many of the newer Cisco IP Phones require more than 10 watts of power. The 3560 and 3750 switch lines have some inline power options that include IEEE 802.3af inline power at up to 15.4 watts per port, but these switches are going to cost thousands of dollars. If your budget is tight, buy a cheap Linksys switch and buy power cables for your Cisco IP Phones. The 7960 is a very old phone at this point in time. I recommend buying a 7941 or 7961 phone because there are some new CUCM 6.x and 7.x features that will not work on the older 7940, 7960, 7912, 7910, and 7905 IP Phones. The 79x1, 79x2, 79x5, 7970, and 7911 phones have more resources to support more features. The older phones are referred to in the CUCM SRND as Type A phones, while the newer phones are Type B phones. The flash and DRAM on the Type B phones allow them to support the full feature set, while Type A phones have been out of DRAM since Call Manager 4.1. A used 7960 phone should cost less than $100- per phone, while the 7961 will be less than $150- per phone. The 7961 is a better investment if you can spare the extra money. I recommend buying 3 Cisco IP Phones so you can emulate a real world dial plan on one of the phones. The real world dial plan will require two call processing agents in addition to three Cisco IP Phones.

Here are some examples of having two call processing agents:

1) Two CUCM clusters
2) One CUCM cluster and one CUCME platform
3) Two CUCME platforms

The next blog will focus on some details of running CUCM and/or CUCME. Feel free to discuss different lab options.