Buying the cheapest right stuff
So you want to have a home voice lab, that is cheap as much as possible?
I hope this short explanation would help you guys out there to decide what are the right equipments to buy.
The first equipment I acquired was 2 units of 2801 for the HQ, you don’t have to worry about the dsp because it has built in dsp and plug and play voice interface card, quite expensive and it cost me a lot
But I have to let go off my 1 unit 2801 so I could buy all the equipment I need to achieve my goal
I bought 2 units of 2611XM, and 1 unit 2621xm, >>> all of these cost me 1/3 price of the 2801.
Gateways
2801 gw (HQ) w/ fxo card
2 units 2611xm gw (Branch) w/ nm-hdv2 –t1 installed w/ pvdm, (borrowed it from a friend), fxo card
2621xm (pstn simulator) w/ nm-2v w/ fxo & fxs installed
2621xm and 2611xm doesn’t have built in dsp’s so you have to buy nm modules for voice
I prefer nm-hdv2 for the gateways (so you could add some pvdm’s cards)
H.323 and MGCP are the only protocol’s that you can simulate for the 2600xm series it does not support sip and sccp protocols. However I can simulate sip & sccp protocol thru my 2801 router
For the endpoints
7960g 2 units w/ poe inj.
7961 1 unit w/ poe inj.
3 host created in vmware with different lan cards and installed with ip communicator (my old pc), “to save some power consumption”
For the call processing
I bought highend pc installed with 64bit Operating system (so I could maximize the memory of the mobo) installed w/ dual lancards, additional lan cards would vary depending on the design you want , for me I used 3 lancards. run them in the vmware, I allocate 1 gig ram of memory every call manager even the Unified presence and cisco unity connection manager.
For the switch (network infrastructure)
2950 1 unit
The strategy is using a different vlan to every sites. in my design I used vlan 2 for the hq and vlan 3 & 4 for the branch
“To get through the hardest journey we need to take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping”
