Can CCM 4.3.1 and CRS 4.1 be virtualized?

[JASON WELCH]

I am looking to put together a UCM4.3.1 and CRS 4.1 lab to prepare myself for our production upgrade from CCM4.1.3 and CRS4.0. Since both UCM4.3.1 and CRS4.1 run on 2003 my current lab equipment (DL320s) won't work with the installation, is it possible to get a MCS7835, load it out with RAM and HDDs then use VMWare to virtualize my environment for the upgrade lab? Has anyone done anything like this before?

Thank you in advance for your help.

[dgoodwin · Accepted solution]

You might figure out ways to accomplish setting up an environment like that, but you will not be able to accurately reproduce the upgrade steps you will encounter with the real systems, due to the fact that your real upgrade will require a complete re-image using the hardware detection discs, at some point during the process.

Regards,

Dave

[Jon Nelson]

This can be done by doing the following:

1. Load the proper Cisco OS to the 7835 that supports 4.3.1 (OS 2003.1.2)

2. Use VMWare's P2V application (which is free) to create a VMWare image of the base OS, thus preserving Cisco's configuration.

3. Load the VMWare image with VMWare and install CM just as you normally would.

4. Repeat the steps for the CRS installation.

I would get your VMWare environment setup identical to your production environment and then perform your upgrade to see how things react. The nice thing about this trick is that you can get your VMWare image to a particular point and copy it or snapshot it and test as many times as necessary.

I use VMWare for all of my lab setups.

I would also ask why you are upgrading to 4.3 instead of 5.1. If it is because of CRS 4.5, I would understand, but CRS or UCCX 5.x is now available and has a similar feature set to UCCX 4.0 and 4.1 and also supports high availability.

Thank you,

Jon

[JASON WELCH]

More than anything I have just been a little hessitant to jump from a M$ platform to a Linux platform(I believe thats what 5.1 and up are); because my lack of experience in Linux.

Another reason is I haven't heard too much about 5.1 of UCM. We do have a CRS cluster (4.0.4 now) so whatever upgrade path I take on the CCM side will obviously affect my CRS cluster. From what I see on the CRS compatibility matrix it looks like 4.5.1 does work with UCM5.1 Do you have experience with this type of CRS\UCM setup?

[Jon Nelson]

The nice thing about CM 5.x & 6.x is that while do they do run on a Linux platform, you do not need to know Linux as it is an appliance and you do not have access to the system like you do on the Windows platform.

I've used CM 5.x with CRS 4.5 and it works fine, but there are limitations such as no high availability with CRS 4.5. This has been fixed in CRS 5.x.

There is nothing wrong with staying on a Windows platform, merely just a question. I have systems running in both 4.x and 5.x and they both work great.

Thank you,

Jon

[mamoss]

I've used the VMWare converter very successfully before on 4.x systems to create images, however I recently tried with 4.3 which is built on 2003 and was unable to get it working. When I run up the VMWare image, it prompts about Windows not being activated and requires a new key from MS. Anyone got 4.3 running successfully in VMWare and how?