Accessing collaboration servers in Cisco's DevNet sandbox

- [Instructor] In this video, we want to take a look at how we can go out to Cisco's DevNet Sandbox and get some free access to Cisco collaboration gear that we can get some practice on. The great folks at Cisco DevNet have given us access to a plethora of technologies that we can reserve and access for free. And among those technologies, we have collaboration servers that we can go access. And here's a shortcut to get to the DevNet Sandbox. You can go to kwtrain.com/sandbox. And when you go there, you're going to be presented with this login screen. You could log in with your Google credentials or Facebook, various ways you can log in. I'm going to log in with my Cisco ID. So let's get logged in. And once you're logged in, you see different categories of labs on the right-hand side. I'm going to go under collaboration and this version of the CO Core exam is based on version 12.5 of Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Let's see if we have any 12.5 labs. And we do. Cisco UC Manager 12.5. And I could go in and say reserve this and different labs give you a different amount of maximum time that you can reserve lab. For this particular lab, and again, this may be different when you're watching the video, but I could say I want to edit the schedule and I can reserve this for a maximum of three days. So that's quite a bit of time to get some experience. But I've already got a reservation in place, so I'll cancel out of that and to get to my existing reservation, I'll click on Reservations. And here is Collaboration 12.5. And you see that we've got a fairly robust Cisco Unified Communications topology. We've got a Microsoft Windows Server that's acting as our Active Directory server and our DNS server. We've got Communications Manager publisher and subscriber servers. We've got a Cisco IM and Presence Server. And we have a Cisco Unity Connection server and what you can do from your PC or laptop, you can set up a VPN connection into the Cisco DevNet Sandbox and access these servers through a browser. And even though you may not be required to do actual configuration on your exam, I still think it's going to be a great benefit to you if you go in and do some of the configurations that we're going to be doing throughout this course if you do those in this environment. And later on in the course, we're going to show ya how to get Cisco Jabber installed and registered. You could download Cisco Jabber, put it on your laptop and have that Cisco Jabber client register with this topology out in the Cisco DevNet Sandbox. Now let's take a look at how we get connected to this topology. We need to set up a VPN connection and if we go into the VPN tab. Make this just a bit larger so we can see it, notice that there is a link to download the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client software. And if you go here, it's going to give you a download for Microsoft Windows or for macOS. And there's a connection guide that you can read. And when you first make your reservation, I've already had this one in place for a while, but once you make the reservation, it's going to say it's setting up and it might take quite a bit of time to do that setup but when the setup is finished, it's going to say active and your credentials to log in through the VPN, you can see those in this Output window. You're going to see, for example, here is the VPN network that I point my VPN client to. And then I've got username and password credentials that I could use to log in. So that's how we get connected. Now let's see if we can connect to our Communications Manager server where we're going to be spending a lot of time in this course. Let's go back over to our Collaboration Lab tab. And under the Lab User Guide, we're going to be able to see if, scroll down here to I think it's page 10, it's going to give us the login credentials and IP addresses for our different servers. If I want to connect to my Communications Manager publisher, for example, I'm going to go to 10.10.20.1. I'm going to log in with the username of administrator and a password of Ciscopstd. So let me copy this IP address. I'm going to open up another tab. We'll paste that in and I'll say Cisco Unified Communications Manager. And I've already logged in previously, so it's not asking me for those credentials again but if it did, they're right here in this lab guide. Again, here is the username and here is the password. But we're logged in now to our Cisco Unified Communications Manager and throughout this course, we're going to be diving into a bunch of these menus. Make this a bit larger. We're going to go into these menus and see how to do a lot of configuration. So my suggestion is, after we have a video on, for example, configuring a specific type of gateway, you could go in to this Gateway tab and go through that process yourself to really engrain that process in your mind. If we go to System and take a look at the servers we have, we'll see that have both a publisher server and a subscriber server and in addition to that, we've got a Cisco IM and Presence server. So that's a look at how we can go out and get access to a couple of Communication Manager servers, a Microsoft Windows 2012 server, a Cisco Unity Connection server and an IM and Presence serve, which is going to give us a ton of hands-on experience to reinforce what you're learning throughout this course without the need to necessarily create your own home lab. And now that we've discussed a couple of different ways that we can get access to some hands-on practice gear, let's dive into the course.