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We’ve all made that dreaded customer care phone call, wondering while dialing how long we’ll be stuck on hold. Whether it’s for tech support or to check on an airline reservation, one thing is certain: it won’t be short. For companies that provide customer care, this is a vexing problem. It puts your reputation at risk, but unpredictable call volumes and the occasional curve ball make the process difficult to fix.

What you need is a way to marshal all the knowledge in your company – across borders and business units – quickly to get to the bottom of a customer’s issue. The challenge may seem daunting, but Cisco’s Unified Communications platform can tip the odds in your favor.

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Nobody is in just one business any more. Whether you run an investment bank or sell shoes – or do anything in between – you’re also in the IT business. You don’t have a choice. What was once good for a competitive advantage is now the price of admission, and it’s getting steeper every day. In addition to having to implement and maintain systems that support your business, you need to keep pace with innovation, ensuring that you don’t fall behind the competition.

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Trade-up to Citrix XenDesktop 4, and you’ll get a simple, low-risk path to desktop virtualization for your entire enterprise. By trading-up, you can leverage your current XenApp licenses to get XenDesktop 4 – and add high-definition virtual desktops for every user in your organization to all the features you have with XenApp.

Click here to save up to 80% when you upgrade to XenDesktop 4 >>

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Desktop management can be among the most frustrating responsibilities in an IT department. Unlike the datacenter, which is central, contained and clearly under the control of IT pros, desktops are out in the “Wild West.” Employees load them up with non-standard, often untested software. Invariably, something goes wrong, and an already lean desktop support team has to affect a swift resolution.

The solution to this problem is to manage desktops the way you manage your servers – centrally. Citrix XenDesktop puts you in charge of your company’s desktops, enabling you to stretch your IT budget and deliver more effective service to your business users.

Here are five advantages to desktop virtualization:

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The hardest part of improving employee collaboration is cultural: you need to make it habit to communicate. For too long, the contrary has been the case. Not knowing where pockets of expertise reside, employees have had to do more on their own, spending time looking for solutions that their colleagues may know immediately. It’s not their fault, though. Without the tools to collaborate effectively, people have had to become more self-reliant. Even in businesses where collaboration and sharing tools have been implemented, they’ve often failed to deliver on the ease of use, specific functionality and performance necessary to make collaboration a reality.

Cisco Unified Communications changes the technological barriers, delivering integrated video, voice and data and applications to make genuine real-time collaboration possible. History, however, has shaped perception, resulting in a hefty dose of skepticism that will have to be overcome in order for collaboration to become a reality. So, to gain employee buy-in, you’ll need to make the case for collaboration. With Cisco UC, you’ll have the resources you need to demonstrate that collaboration isn’t just possible but effective.

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This post comes to us from two of our own experts, Rich Brumpton (of The Generation V) and Duane Bradley (of MSTerminalServices.org) – both MTM Technologies employees. In order to directly import VHDs into a XenServer store, you need to import it into an NFS or EXT3 volume.

Rich Brumpton gives us those easy steps here:

1. Copy VHD to NFS or EXT3 storage
2. Rename to UUID.vhd (pick a unique UUID, I usually just index up by 1 off of an existing one)
3. Run xe sr-scan uuid=sr-uuid (you can use xe sr-list name-label=sr-name
4. Set a Name Label using xe vdi-param-set uuid=disk-uuid name-label=disk-name
5. Attach the imported disk to a VM

Easy enough. But what if you don’t have an NFS share or extra local disk handy to firnat as EXT3? That’s where Duane Bradley comes to the rescue:

1. We need to remove the LVM storage repository first. (Note:If you have VMs on your existing local LVM backed SR make sure you backup or export them and then delete them from the SR before continuing.) To do this, log into the XenCenter command line console and follow these steps:

• At the console, type  cat /etc/xensource-inventory to display the basic server inventory information. Find the DEFAULT_SR_PHYSDEVS= line in the displayed file and make a note of its current setting. In a single disk system this should be something like /dev/sda3.
• First, we need to determine the UUID for your default SR by issuing the xe sr-list command to display information about it. Make a note of the default UUID.
• Next, we’ll determine the UUIDof  your default SRs PBD by issuing the xe pbd-list sr-uuid=<your SR UUID> command  to display the PBD information of your default SR. Make a note of the PBD UUID.
• Now we’ll disconnect the default SR by issuing the xe pbd-unplug uuid=<your PBD UUID> command to disconnect your default SR.
• Finally, we need to remove the default SR by issuing the xe sr-destroy uuid=<your SR UUID>   to delete the default SR.

 2. Now we can create and configure a new default VHD backed Storage Repository using EXT3. Still at tge console, follow these steps: 

•  At the console, type xe sr-create content-type=”Local SR” host-uuid=(hit tab since you have a single host) device-config-device=<YOUR DEVICE>  shared=false name-label=”Local EXT-3 SR” (Note: This command may take a few minutes to complete and will return a UUID for your newly created SR once it is finished.)
  • For example:  # xe sr-create content-type=”local SR” host-uuid=5d189b7a-cd5e-4029-9940-d4daaa34633d device-config-device=/dev/sda3 shared=false name-label=”Local EXT-3 SR”)
• Make a note of the UUID returned after executing the sr-create command, then set your new SR to be the default SR and default suspend SR by typing the following commands. 
  • To set your SR as the default SR on the system type the command xe pool-param-set default-SR=<YOUR NEW SR UUID>  uuid=(hit tab since you have a single pool) - For Example: # xe pool-param-set default-SR=a803b8d2-1252-14a2-cbc9-c530c7b398c4 uuid=2e95c9dd-14f7-52bd-89f91ab9217cbdc
  • To set the default suspend SR, issue the following command: xe pool-param-set suspend-image-SR=<YOUR NEW SR UUID> uuid=(Hit tab since you have a single pool) - For Example:# xe pool-param-set uuid=2e95c9dd-14f7-52bd-89f9-91ab9217cbdc suspend-image-SR=a803b8d2-1252-14a2-cbc9-c530c7b398c4

Now you’re ready to go. Happy Virtualizing!

There has been much ado lately about the new entries by enterprise vendors into the server hardware space. Blades, blades, and more blades. They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors now.

But, are they relevant in the virtualization environment any more?

Yes. I am challenging the conventional wisdom that blade servers are the best way to go for your datacenter, primarily because virtualization is leading to the commoditization of the datacenter. The hypervisor is becoming a giveaway while management for those hypervisors become the product ‘for sale’. Why should server hardware be exempt from this downward pricing pressure?

In classic ProLiant style, HP is releasing what looks to be the next big thing while it’s competitors are catching up to the last big thing. Consider this: The HP DL4×170h G6 server, configured with each of its four nodes having dual Quad-Core E5504 (Yes, those are Nehalem’s), 24GB RAM, six 1GBps NIC ports, and a 250GB mirror is available direct from HP for $15,207. If you do some quick math, that puts 64Ghz of processor power and 96GB of RAM into 2U’s of rack space.

You could argue that the DL1000 series isn’t enterprise class hardware like the DL300 or DL500 series gear; yes the disk is SATA – but aren’t you going to be using the local disk only for the 15GB of space for your hypervisor? The important data is going to be on back end storage, right?

What about interconnects and the cabling nightmare of having all of these individual ports to connect? The high density of blade servers creates a whole new set of networking problems of their own. Connecting 10GBps uplinks to individual blade enclosures is costly, and if you have 16 servers, your uplinks are oversubscribed – and that in a 1-to-1 physical world. Now compound that with multiple VMs on each of those oversubscribed uplinks and you’re stacking cards on top of cards.

You might also make the argument that 24GB of RAM is light for a virtual host. Maybe, but you can swap out the UDIMMs for RDIMMs (a bit pricier, for sure) and each node can then support up to 144GB each. Given that you get four servers in 2U, you may even find that one node can be a virtual host while another is a dedicated physical server. Scalable nodes offer the density and flexibility of blades withtout the environmental challenges, making them practical for branch deployments as well.

So how many utility, application, web, file, directory, or ‘other’ virtual servers do you have taking up valuable CPU or RAM on your ‘big iron’ virtual hosts that could just as easily run on one of these nodes for a fraction of the hardware cost? Do virtual desktops make sense on ‘big iron’ hardware?

While I’m not quite ready to say that the scalable node server is the answer for all of your datacenter computing needs, but I think it’s something that has received little coverage and may be a platform that deserves a look.

Key value propositions for a Unified Communication strategy is lower TCO and the simplicity of a converged network infrastructure. However, this single infrastructure is the underlying success or failure of all business-critical technologies of the organization.

Understanding the potential impact is not new to most of you, nor are the concepts to mitigate risk. Yet, we still see a high percentage of firms deploy UC technologies without taking the required steps for ensuring the long-term health of the solution including assessment and design, implementation, management and monitoring.

Assessment & Design – most networks were built to support data applications that were tolerant of poor network conditions.  So, it’s critical to validate network readiness and then design, or re-design, and optimize the network, factoring in performance, resiliency and quality of service (QOS).

Implementation – UC deployments can create significant project and budget overruns if best practices and manufacturer guidelines are not followed. End user perceptions also have a significant impact on the overall success of the project. It’s important to follow best practices so potential issues are anticipated and mitigated before they have a negative impact on the project.

Management & Monitoring – A 24×7 monitoring solution is increasingly important to minimize business disruption and should provide real-time alerts and historical trends for full FCAPS (Fault management, Configuration management, Accounting, Performance management and Security) management and monitoring.  

 While UC technologies have been around for the past decade, they’re continually evolving and maturing. Keeping up with these changes is a daunting task. Ask us how we can help with the full solution lifecycle from our UC/VoIP Readiness Assessment, design, implementation, end user training, 24×7 Monitoring and Remote Support Services.

New directions and new ideas at VoiceCon last week in San Francisco at the Moscone Convention Center. The Yankee Group estimated there were about 3,000 people who attended the premier communications event, about the same as 2008, a good turnout given the cloud of trepidation hanging over the industry about the economy and corporate investment in technology.
New directions for business communications revolved around the integration of social media into the corporate world. The potential impact and dangers of meshing interactive sites into the mainstream marketing, operations and administration were hot topics at VoiceCon. One interesting idea was bringing Twitter into the enterprise as a true working communications tool rather than a novelty marketing application, a starting point for many companies. IT teams are faced with a daunting challenge in meeting expectations and assumptions of an increasingly social media savvy workforce with the security, management and support requirements of the corporation. This will be a fascinating, rapidly-changing dynamic to follow between end-users and tech staff.
New ideas for Unified Communications focused more than ever around solving business processes and operational issues through applications available under the UC umbrella. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, it’s our responsibility as trusted advisors to our clients to expand conversations outside IT to every key area of the business so we can understand the potential impact of UC and ensure we’re designing and deploying the right solution with a return on investment that makes good business sense.
Expanding UC to mobile communications was another key point for customers. We’ve spoken for years about building demand for seamless communications from anywhere from any device and it’s now a pre-requisite for businesses with mobile phones appearing to be the consensus pick for the primary end-user device in the years ahead. The key for us is proving the value of that flexibility and mobility – how does that make our clients money? Save money? Make their employees more productive? What is the value of reaching the right person the first time at any time? Another challenge will be supporting clients in the design, deployment and management of a challenging technology environment.
By the time we hit VoiceCon 2010 in Orlando next March, we should see tremendous inroads of social media into the corporate infrastructure with some deeper ground rules and guidance on best practices for integration and support as well as further announcements from vendors on mobility enhancements for collaboration and presence.

The time has come for you to replace that old PBX, that legacy museum piece that barely trudges along every day on life support. You need the latest and greatest, a system with redundancy and reliability, a total solution that energizes you with the same excitement and intrique as the newest four-wheel equipment on the showroom floor. Your infrastucture is Cisco, so a migration to a converged voice and data system is a natural, but your business, your credibility and your position depend on your next decision. That’s why you call MTM, a Cisco Masters Unified Communications partner.

The Cisco Master Unified Communications Specialization recognizes an elite group of partners with in-depth technology skills and proven customer success in selling, deploying and supporting UC solutions. There are many Cisco partners who can get behind the velvet rope, but only a select few that have earned entrance into the VIP section. The Masters UC is Cisco’s stamp of success, for expertise, experience and excellence.

To earn the Masters UC, MTM has to demonstrate proven customer success – every year providing five customer references for successful delivery of integrated, multiple unified communications solutions and applications integration in contact centers, unified messaging, rich media, mobility and presence. We have to continue our investment in our technology expertise, including additional CCIEs, industry-recognized project managers and third-party application integrators. Also, we have to maintain our services capability and methodology for post-implementation support for our MTM’s Managed Services team.

Cisco requires an annual audit so independent authorities can validate these challenging requirements and certify that MTM works dilgently every day as a trusted advisor for helping you trash that eyesore in your telecom closet. We’ll even recommend a museum to provide tender care of your old reliable hardware while you celebrate your new UC solution.