Why is Cisco Licensing so terrible?
Well, it's been a while since I've written anything here. Since my last post, a lot of things have happened. One of those things perfectly illustrates a poorly thought out aspect of Cisco Licensing, especially for Unified Communications running on VMware. I've believed forever that using the Primary DNS and NTP servers as part of the License MAC generation was a bad idea, but I never really thought about how unpleasant it could be. I recently traveled to Brazil to deploy our UC-on-UCS environment there, and built out all of the servers. When I first arrived onsite, I contacted our systems team and requested they send me the DNS/NTP information that I would need to use for the build (and licensing). They sent me the information without any hassle, which was a huge bonus. Fast forward, installation is done, I'm back home, and I set up RTMT. Low and behold, I'm getting alarms that the Primary NTP server is inaccessible. Hmmm, that's odd, but sure enough, I can...