Call Manager 4.1 upgrade to 6.0

[gflorescu]

I'm planning an upgrade from CM 4.1 to 6.0. I've been reading thru the Upgrade Guides, etc. but I'd like to know what other things I should do before the upgrade. This is a very drastic upgrade as the Upgrade guide indicates

"your hard drive will be formatted and it will erase everything".

1. I took an image of the server with Acronis Imaging

2. I used BARS to take a fresh backup.

3. I manually backed up the registry.

If anybody's gone thru this already, what else should I be doing before I do the upgrade?

[gogasca]

Have all your CDs for CCM 4.X in case anything wrong happens.

But if you have a goood backup and DMA runs clean im pretty sure your migration will be succesful.

It will erase everything since now OS is different

[gflorescu]

I'm also using IPCX and Unity in my environment. The one I'm really concerned with is the IPCX and how it interfaces with Call Manager.

Any ideas on that?

[Jon Nelson]

You will need to upgrade IPCC Express at the same time you migrate to CUCM6. CUCM6 requires UCCX 5.x. Keep in mind that UCCX5.x also requires an OS upgrade to the Cisco Windows Server 2003 OS.

I second everything Gonz says ...

Thank you,

Jon Nelson

[gflorescu]

Is the whole thing pretty straight forward? I'm just afraid of it I guess because I've never done an upgrade this drastic before.

What about the scripts, will they migrate easily? How about agents/supervisors, skill based routing, etc.?

Do I have to know what the dial plans, route lists, etc. currently are?

[Jon Nelson]

It is a complete rebuild. You will lose all historical data, although you could backup the SQL database and home grown reports against it.

I've had mixed success with the scripts. I've ended up re-writing most of them. There are new supervisor and desktop agents that will need to get installed as part of the install.

The key thing with any upgrade is to have all of your licensing in order and make sure that your hardware is supported.

Thank you,

Jon Nelson

[walteryork]

You are already familiar with the Acronis software. I was able to perform a major migration from CCM 4.1 to 5.1 and IPCC 4.05 to 5.x with about 4 minutes of total downtime.

1. Use the Acronis package with the disimilar hardware feature to perform a live backup of CallManager and IPCC.

2. Restore these backups to any old systems lying around. Using the same IP addresses as production. Make sure the new systems are segmented from your production. Make sure the IPCC box has the dual NICs and be sure to set the IP addresses on each nic. One as your production and the other to a non-routable IP. Run C:\Program Files\Cisco\Desktop\Bin\postinstall.exe to associate your extra NIC as the packet sniffing adapter.

3. Perform the DST update on Unity so it will communicate with the newer CallManager version. (This is very important!)

4. Run the preupgrade check software on CallManager. Install all phones and Communicator instances that you have properly licensed on CallManager!!!! This will save you headache later as the upgrade process grandfathers what ever you have installed on your 4.x system.

5. Backup EVERYTHING on IPCC. Copy all of your scripts, prompts, agent CSQ memberships and levels, database connections, recorded wav and raw files. All settings in desktop Administrator including your workflows, export recorded files to wav using the crsrawtowav.exe utility (Information can be found about this through searching newsgroups) etc...

6. Setup a box as a TFTP server.

7. Run the DMA tool on CallManager. This may take some time.

8. Remove your current production from your network by placing them on a router not connected to your network.

9. Move your "extra" boxes that were setup with IPCC and Callmanager into production. All phones will register to the phone system but should work. You can also test this while they are in their own segmented network.

10. Run the OS install CD on the IPCC. This can be done while Call Manager is running the DMA process. Once complete, run any OS updates if needed.

11. Once DMA is complete, load the Callmanager install DVD. (even though you have an Altiris Backup, I took the time to ghost the system)

12. The DVD install is fairly straight forward, it can take some time though and you cannot just walk away from it unless you use the unattended answer files. Point the install to the TFTP server location that you saved your DMA file to.

13. Once installed, follow the instructions for installing any Subscribers.

[walteryork]

14. Follow instructions for getting the license file for CallManager and import. (This was completed in a little over 5 minutes)

15. Verify that both CallManager Publishers and Subsribers talk to each other. My upgrade, I had to add my subscriber back into the callmanager group but I cannot guarantee that I didn't have it in the group before the upgrade.

16. There is a major change from CallManager versions. Users are split into two different categories now. Application Users and End Users. The DMA migration tool is not intuitive enough to know which IPCC account should be which. You will have to delete your RMCM and JTAPI user accounts from the End Users. You will also have to delete all of your CTI ports and Triggers. Be sure the extensions are removed as well! (I highly recommend this is done before you begin the application part of your IPCC box.)

17. Go into CallManager Servicability Console and start the AXL service. (You may not have to do this... I did)

18. Run the software install on your IPCC box.

19. IPCC will run a wizard the first time you start it. Follow all of the prompts, it will ask you for an AXL account etc... You can use some of the same named accounts as you had on the previous version if you deleted the end user account from CallManager.

20. Once IPCC is up and running, make sure that your monitoring NIC is setup properly via the postinstall.exe program.

21. Follow instructions for updating your licenses. If your upgrade is not in place... meaning version 4.5 to 5.x then you will have problems with the license file they send you. You will need to call the number they provide when returning the license file you sign up for and request a NEW LICENSE for your version and not an UPGRADE LICENSE. Make sure you have a current contract. You may need to talk to several people before they even know what to do.

22. While waiting for step above, import all of your scripts, prompts etc... Recreate your call control groups etc... If you have any issue with these, it is possible that they weren't completely deleted from CallManager.

23. Uninstall CAD, Supervisor desktop etc from all clients and install the latest.

WOW - I think you will have a system setup! Oh, did we mention the UNPUBLISHED CAVEATS to IPCC???? That will be in another post to this group. I hope this is a helpful post to you. Maybe this will keep you out of the same things I had to crawl through....

[walteryork]

Caveats to IPCC version 5.0(1)

1. If you use agent popups that include enterprise data... kiss it goodbye till you get an ES patch and a new agent.exe executable. It still won't work like it did before but hey software design says you can create a batch file to, "fix" what they designed it to do.

2. If you record calls, the system will not automatically purge them after 7 days like previous versions. You will have to get a Cisco patch to fix this. Make sure you do this before your hard-drive runs out of free space! (I caught it well before ;) )

3. Don't on purpose or accidentally shutdown your system impoperly. You run the risk of corrupting the boot.ini file. This too is addressed in an unpublished ES patch.

Hope this helps you, please remember to rate helpful posts.

[gflorescu]

Thanks a lot for all of that information. I'm sure it will save me a bunch of headaches. I'll let you know how it goes.

[gflorescu]

For the IPCX side, I didn't see anywhere in the documentation that talks about backing up and restoring to the new version. I know I can use BARS to back it up, I'm just not sure how I'm going to restore it to the new install.