Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Can Cisco Power Injector power up 2702 access point with 3x4?

For the latest Cisco 2700 series AP, if you power it up with standard 802.3af PoE switch, you can only achieve 3x3.

However if you power it up with 802.3at PoE switch, or using power cube, you can achieve the maximum performance 3x4.

How about power injectors?

The answer is yes for power injector 4 (AIR-PWRINJ4=), you will get 3x4 with power injector 4.  However you cannot get 3x4 with power injector 5 (AIR-PWRINJ5=), because power injector 5 is designed to provide 802.3af power only, you will only get 3x3 in this case

IP dialling from Telepresence endpoints with UCM

The latest strategy / best practice for telepresence deployment is to register all the endpoints to UCM instead of VCS, and using Expressway C and E for B2B calls.  There are several feature gaps, for endpoints register to UCM and VCS, one of the most common ask is IP dialling.  In an ideal world we can make calls and receive calls with SIP URI, but there are still quite a lot of endpoints / users in the field using IP address dialling to make calls.  I have read a very good post from UC Guerrilla and I have tested option 1 which works quite well in my lab environment.  (My lab environment:  UCM 10.5 + Expressway 8.2)


For the end user who wants to make outgoing IP address dialling, they can make a call to URI ip@a.b.c.d where a.b.c.d is the IP address.

On UCM, you need to define the SIP route pattern beforehand.



Then what I need to do is to simply add a transform on the Expressway-C to remove the "ip@" suffix.  You also need to have a search rule to route the IP address to Expressway E then to the DNS Zone.  Try to make a call using IP dialling now!


Getting started with Unified Access on 3850

My lab environment:  XE 3.6.0

To start playing with 3850 unified access, it is quite simple.  The first thing to do is to enable the web interface.  

1.  First of all, make sure you have your SVI with IP address configured.  In my lab my SVI is VLAN216.

interface Vlan216
 ip address 192.168.24.50 255.255.255.0

2.  Then enable the http and https server on the switch with local authentication.  I have made an assumption here you have already got local user created with privilege level 15.

ip http server
ip http authentication local
ip http secure-server

3. Change the wireless management interface to your management VLAN SVI.  In my lab I am using the same VLAN for simplicity.

wireless management interface Vlan216

4.  Since my lab environment is a single switch environment, you need to change it to mobility controller (MC) so that the access point can join your 3850 controller.  By default it is set as mobility agent (MA)

wireless mobility controller

5.  You can also set your AP country in advance to make sure you use the correct frequency.

ap country HK

Now you can try to access the web GUI via http://192.168.24.50/wireless

Dashboard (showing 1 x 11ac client is associated to my 3702 AP)
AVC stat per WLAN

CleanAir detects interference source

Per Client AVC stats

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Upgrading 3850 IOS-XE software

Just got a chance to play with 3850, the upgrade operation on the 3850 IOS-XE platform is a bit different from traditional IOS.  By default it is booted in "Install" mode, which uses a package provisioning file called packages.conf in flash.  If you want to change it back to the legacy way to do IOS upgrade, you can change to "Bundle" mode, however it is not recommended as additional memory is needed.

You can see the mode from show version.

To upgrade new IOS, you can download the .bin file from cisco.com just like you do it in legacy IOS, then copy it to flash.  Then you can issue the command "software install file flash:cat3k_blablabla.bin" to kick start the installation process.  After reload you will have the new IOS-XE booted.