[cisco-voip] New Deployment - AD not ready so?

[Darren Ward]

The business is very keen to have a single repository for user information
and it was seen as one of the benefits of IP Telephony and Cisco in
particular that they could use standard AD and SQL for almost all reporting
and user info storage.
 
As far as deployments go we are cutting over an older Alcatel PABX to the
Cisco IP Telephony at one remote site with the Call Managers in at the
central data centres.
 
This means that we need to do the whole site and that site is not due for
migration to 2003 until Q2 2005 and the IP Telephony is due Q4 2004. So no
luck there hence asking how it would be best to deploy so that we can
migrate to use native mode Exchange 2003 and AD later on.
 
Just so as I can stress the importance of change management for AD to our
systems guys, do you have an example or two of what changes broke your
current IP Telephony installation?
 
Darren

  _____  

From: Voll, Scott [mailto:Scott.Voll at wesd.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, 15 September 2004 12:15 AM
To: Darren Ward; cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Subject: RE: [cisco-voip] New Deployment - AD not ready so?



Darren-

 

I just got into Cisco IPT last year with a ICS 7750 running CM 3.3.4, Unity
4.0.2 and then bought a 7825 and IPCC Express 3.1.2.  We are in the process
of migrating off the ICS to 7835's. 

 

Just a head's up on integration with AD.  We integrated with AD 2000 and
just know if you make a lot of AD changes, expect things to break in your
IPT network.  When AD and IPT work, everything is great, but as soon as your
SysAdmin changes your AD policy, kiss your IPT good bye.  I've spent many
mornings on the phone with TAC to find out the night before someone screwed
with AD.

 

With all that said.  CM and IPCC is a simple plug-in to integrate with AD.
Make sure you keep them in there own workgroup.  Unity you can install with
Exchange 5.5 and then upgrade to 2003.  AD Prep is required to get this
working.  Exchange 2003 needs to run on a Win2k3 box but you can run in AD2k
mixed mode.

 

My suggestion, use the CM directory and forget AD. But if you want the AD
integration, I believe you can run the AD plugin at any time down the road.
And if you can, wait to install Unity until you have an Exchange 2k3 box.
It will just make your life a whole lot easier.  Can you get the Exchange
2k3 box up and as you bring people onto IPT migrate there mail box store?
How are you implementing IPT?  Department by department, or all at once?  Do
you control the AD domain and the IPT network?  Or someone else is in charge
of the AD network?

 

Scott

  _____  

From: Darren Ward [mailto:dward at pla.net.au] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 4:32 AM
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Subject: [cisco-voip] New Deployment - AD not ready so?

 

Hi All,

 

We're about to deploy the core of a new IP Telephony network using CCM 4,
Unity 4 and IPCC Express Standard 3.5

 

Unfortunately Active Directory has only been deployed for server
registrations and users are still in the old NTLM based NT4 domain with full
trust priveleges between the two and the users are still using Exchange 5.5,
but we'll be moving them to AD on 2003 and Exchange 2003 over the next 12
months. 

 

This does mean that the CCM, IPCCE and Unity servers can be on the new AD
domain and I'm thinking this is the best thing to do since Unity especially
wants to modify the tree to add the Cisco subtree for service location etc

 

Unity storage is another issue, I'm thinking maybe it's best to use local
storage for VM and use Exchange 2003 later but can't find any information on
how to migrate this way or if I use Exchange 5.5 then upgrade to 2003 what
will be the impact on Unity? And it's AD prep requirements?

 

User authentication/LDAP is the other issue as I think we'd have to use the
internal CCM4 directory with external authentication and then migrate to use
Active Directory later but I'm not sure if this is advisable or what the
best option is.

 

What would people recommend for this type of deployment?

 

Darren

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-voip/attachments/20040915/69c6fb0b/attachment-0001.html