The Importance of CCNA in the UC Realm

I've been on my soapbox before about knowing data if you are going to be a specialty engineer, whether that be UC, wireless, security, data-center, or whatever else. I had some time on my hands so I built out a nice GNS3 lab to test my data skills. Granted I did cheat a bit since I had gone through the new CCNA R/S course on CBT nuggets, but it is still necessary to know the underlying foundation. My biggest gripe right now is that Cisco wiped out the need for a CCNA R/S as a pre-requisite to CCNA Collab and CCNP Collab. With this new road map, new engineers will be coming into the field for UC not knowing the different between router and switch. Ok, maybe that was a bit too much, but still, the problem remains. Ask them to troubleshoot STP or check a VLAN and you are going to get a blank stare. Anyways, below is a GNS3 image of what I built out. It is still a work in progress and I plan on using this to gauge other engineers's capabilities with data.

The above diagram hosts a variety of different situations that need to be configured. All the internal sites are using OSPF and the WAN connections are using EIGRP. Yes, I could have used OSPF or EIGRP across the board but part of knowing CCNA R/S is route redistribution. Thus, I used two protocol for that part. The other part is the connection to the ISP, I have a static route in place but also put in BGP as I plan on expanding that diagram to another company and bridging together from there. While BGP really isn't touched on much in the CCNA world, it is still mentioned since it is heavily used at the provider level. Additionally, different networks for each gateway per floor that go in sequence as well as ACLs to limit ICMP, web access, ssh, and telnet accordingly. Finally, when egressing to the internet, all gateways will NAT to their public IP (once I get the other ISP gateways put in there). I will also probably add some security on the routers for neighbor authentication for the hell of it as well. It's stuff like this that is important, if the ASICs could be emulated I would be running real switches as well. The switch modules available can do the job though if I really wanted to run STP and get a loop free topology while using etherchannel. Just in case anyone is doubting the configuration:

I know this wasn't really voice related and more of a rant, but I haven't run into anything interesting or different on CUCM lately. I'll try to break something on accident and post about it :)