There’s plenty of great posts out there on how to make bootable CUCM/Collaboration media with paid GUI software such as UltraISO or free command line utilities like cdrtools. Inspired by those bloggers, I wanted to share a method to create bootable media that features the best of both worlds: open source utilities with easy to use interfaces, all for the low low price of free.

Software you’ll need:

7-Zip / cdrtfe

First, find an existing bootable CUCM ISO (a Red Hat or CentOS live cd will do the trick as well) and open it in 7zip.

I’ve recently began studying for my CCNA Collaboration exam and to help with my studies I’ve built a small collaboration lab. Nothing too fancy, a 2811 with PVDMs and FXO/FXS cards, 2 3750 PoE switches, and 2 Cisco 7960 VOIP phones. My lab server has a dedicated NIC which connects to the lab network and hosts a domain controller, workstation, and CUCM 11.5 virtual machines.

All this was working well until I configured the switches to have a separate dedicated voice VLAN. The phones started having issues contacting CUCM and downloading new configuration files or firmware. If I moved the phones back to the same VLAN as CUCM the phones would work properly. Sounded like a TFTP issue to me, and here are the steps I followed to resolve the issue.

So you have stateful failover configured on your pair of Cisco ASAs and need to upgrade ASDM or the os? Maybe a critical security vulnerability was discovered with the software and you need to upgrade them ASAP. With stateful failover, we can perform a zero downtime upgrade on our ASAs to minimize end user disruption. Below are the steps I used to upgrade a pair of ASA 5525-X’s using the command line interface. You can find Cisco’s documentation for upgrading an Active/Standby Failover Configuration here.

Take a look here for Cisco’s official documentation, which will be the blueprint for our guide.

• First, back up your configuration by going to Tools -> Backup Configurations

• Download your updated ASDM and ASA software from Cisco.com
• Click Tools -> Upgrade Software from Local Computer

• We’ll update ASDM first, select ASDM from the drop down box and click Browse Local Files. Navigate to where you downloaded your images and select the new ASDM image then click Upload Image.

The ASA, Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance, has been around for over 15 years and has since become an ubiquitous network security solution, securing networks the world over.

Because it is such a critical device in our networks, it has become best practice to deploy these security appliances in a resilient and highly available configuration.

Currently, Cisco supports Active/Active as well as Active/Standby failover. This article contains a simple example of how to configure Active/Standby stateful high availability on a pair of Cisco ASAs, where one unit acts as the primary ASA and a standby unit becomes active once a failover has occurred. When stateful failover is enabled, connection states are continuously passed between the active and standby units keeping session information available to the new active unit. Please note that both ASAs must be running identical hardware and software versions.