leedesmond’s blog

Confronted with a whole new bunch of terms and acronyms, it can be confusing for someone new trying to make sense of the alphabet soup in the field of Unified Communications and Collaboration. Let us kick off this little tutorial series to introduce the basics when looking at Voice over IP (VoIP) and related technologies.

In VoIP, common standards-based signaling protocols include the well known Session Initiated Protocol (SIP), the H.323 family of protocols, Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), H.248 and Cisco’s proprietary Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP). The first two are peer-to-peer protocols whereas the latter three are client server based. Both SIP and MGCP are ASCII plain text protocols.

Signaling covers the important tasks of end-to-end call initiation and termination, event notifications and the handling of call control messages such as connect and disconnect messages.

End points (devices or gateways) that support SIP and H.323 have on-board call control intelligence. Settings for route patterns and dial plans must be performed directly on the devices which can make configuration complex. On the other hand, MGCP, H.248 and SCCP rely on external call control devices (”call agent”) where the configuration information reside for centralized administration. Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM, CCM Server or “Call Manager”) is an example of a call agent.

It is worthwhile to note that H.323 is the de-facto standard for voice and video-conferencing in today’s packet-switched network. Designed to enhance IP networks with traditional telephony functionality, H.323 compliant end points, gateways and gatekeepers work seamlessly with SCCP in a Cisco environment.

H.323 = ITU-T H.32x standard protocol suite
SIP = IETF Multi-party Multimedia Session Control (MMUSIC Working Group) RFC 2543, 3261, 3665
MGCP = RFC 2705, 3660, 3435, 3661

Technorati tags: VoIP, Unified Communications

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Although “Automatic (recommended)” is the suggested option for Automatic Updates, this little convenience also means that you lose complete control over what kind of Microsoft hotfixes or patches will be downloaded and automatically installed on your Windows-based server and desktop systems.

This is especially true in an unmanaged environment where patch management systems such as WSUS or SMS/SCCM are not deployed to centrally manage or administer the approval of tested patches before widespread rollout. As a result, you may be unnecessary affected by incidents such as the Exchange 2007 SP1 Update Rollup 4 (KB952580) blunder here which is largely beyond your control.

Best practice would be to configure “Notify me but don’t automatically download or install them” for Automatic Updates. Better still, deploy the free WSUS 3.0 SP1 solution with Active Directory Group Policy to regain control of your patch management needs if budget is a constraint.

Technorati tags: WSUS, Security

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The “Default Policy” is the active global policy applied at the forest level with the standard setup of Office Communications Server 2007. This policy neither permits web conferencing or sharing of desktop and program by default. The Live Meeting options when inspected from the client end will be greyed out (Content / Share / Share a Program and Share Your Desktop).

To turn on this feature, start the OCS 2007 MMC, highlight and right-mouse click on the forest. Select Global Properties, Meetings tab, locate Default Policy (under Policy Definition) and click Edit. Check the “Enable web conferencing” option (if not already done) then put a tick against “Enable program and desktop sharing”. Toggle the desired radio box that applies to non-Active Directory users if needed.

On this same dialog, you can enable 2 other options “Allow presenter to record meetings” and “Enable IP audio”.

Once these steps are taken, the inaccessible options will be enabled in addition to a new, third menu option “Start Remote Desktop Sharing” on the Live Meeting client.

Links (update):
Audio/Video/Desktop Sharing

Technorati tags: LCS/OCS, OCS 2007, Unified Communications

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Finally the wait is over. With this optional KB940518 update for Windows Server 2008 (x86 or x64), you can now enable Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 SP1 to be fully integrated into Server Manager. Obviously only the full WS08 install is supported (not Server Core).

A system restart is not needed provided that the Initial Configuration Tasks, Server Manager and the servermanagercmd.exe process are not running during the installation process. As with any other new WS08 server roles, you must explicitly tick the checkbox to install WSUS that is newly exposed via this update in Server Manager. Other dependent features may be offered and acceptance is mandatory for successful installation.

Important:

You will still need to download WSUS 3.0 SP1 (x86 or x64) described in KB948014 and separately run setup if it is not already installed on WS08. This should be done beforehand otherwise the process of adding or enabling the WSUS server role will run to completion with a failure message, a step not clearly described in KB940518. Nevertheless, this error condition will be automatically corrected once WSUS is properly installed.

Note that one of the software pre-requisites prior to running the WSUS setup is to first complete installation of the IIS server role, particularly the IIS 6 compatibility role services that are not included by default. The others described in the WSUS download link are either built into WS08 or optional depending on the installation  option chosen e.g. Report Viewer 2005 Redistributable or SQL Server server/instance.

Technorati tags: Windows Server 2008, WSUS, Security

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The industry-leading VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) hypervisor is the first hypervisor to be listed under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). VMware customers with support policies in place deploying Microsoft Windows Server and applications - running on validated, non-Microsoft server virtualization software - will gain access to co-operative technical support both from Microsoft and VMware.

Outside of SVVP, customers can continue to work directly with VMware for support. This extra layer of additional protection enables VMware to rapidly escalate application issues and work directly with Microsoft engineers to expedite problem resolution.

Read more from source.

TIP: Search for my previous blog entry “Virtualizing Exchange 2007″ for additional information which also covered Microsoft support policy on virtualization.

Technorati tags: VMware, Windows Server Virtualization, Hyper-V

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