Backup BE6000 disks, without SmartNet?

[Just Someone YKnow]

It has been determined that our organization is unable to afford the costs associated with SmartNet support, and we are just going to have to use the controller without any support contract whatsoever.

I am going to try to take some proactive steps to keep the system functional in the event of hardware failure or data corruption without official Cisco support. My primary concern is protecting the (currently functional) VMWare boot flash and the CUCM / Unity virtual machine images.

Apparently the best course of action is to shut down the controller, remove these storage devices, and then clone them to an external USB SSD with a 3rd party disk cloning software such as CloneZilla. I then perform a test writing the cloned disks back to non-Cisco storage media for the boot flash and virtual machines.

This will be done in addition to the automated daily backups to an external SFTP server, so that in the event of storage failure I can quickly get it running again without having to resort to an expensive single-incident Cisco hardware support request.

I am interested to know if anyone else has done such things to keep a Cisco device running without the official SmartNet support costs.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

There is nothing proprietary about ESXi itself on the BE6k. If I found myself in your shoes I would document the ESXi config, including license key, and have the ISO on hand. VMs are easy to export a copy of when powered down. The main thing Cisco doesn’t want you doing is snapshots.
https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-software-requirements.html#VMwareFeature_UC

Having a hot spare drive wouldn’t hurt. Ensuring notifications, from CIMC or elsewhere, are setup so you are notified of a drive failure so you can replace it quickly (and hope the rebuild from parity succeeds).