CUCM 10.5 installation in an OpenStack Environment.

[frederic gilles]

Hi,

In order to create a lab, I tried to install a CUCM 10.5 on a virtualization OpenStack environment. 

But the hardware checking step has failed despite the good hardware configuration of the VM (CPU/RAM/Disk).

Has someone already tried to install a CUCM in an Openstack Environment and would have any clue to give me?

Regards,

Frederic,

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi 

It's not supported on OpenStack, and CUCM etc are all 'appliance' type products not intended to be customised.

Basically if you are attempting to learn Cisco, you are wasting your time looking at issues you will never encounter in real life. Get hold of VMware vSphere and install on that using the supplied OVA template files.

Regards

Aaron

[frederic gilles]

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your quick answer.

A lot of Cloud Providers solutions are based on OpenStack. I subscribed with one of them and I would like to test if I can deploy a CUCM on this environment.

We use CUCM only for AXL Development and so this kind of solution would be enough for our need.

Regards,

Frederic,

[Gordon Ross]

VMWare Workstation/Fusion is enough to run CUCM, which is a bit cheaper than vSphere if you're only looking at software development rather than call processing.

GTG

[Aaron Harrison]

I develop apps for CUCM, and I have a small lab based around HP ML110 servers. It's a small server with 16GB RAM that runs home-PC spec HDDs and has 4 CPU cores.

It cost about 500GBP. I have more than one but rarely power them up, have all versions of CUCM, UCCX etc from 4 upwards on it.

I don't need to run all the instances at once, and I provision the amount of RAM/CPU that Cisco suggest for a live environment only for the initial build then strip it back a bit to give more headroom. These dev servers aren't busy and I don't care if they run a bit slow.

I don't know how your cloud provider would work but if you have say 20 VMs, with 2 CPUs each, 4Gb of RAM...  do they just add it up? Would it be more cost effective to have your own hardware?

Just throughts really - but varying from the VMware stack that CUCM is designed for will just create you more work. When Cisco bring out a new version of CUCM, will it work on your CloudStack? Are you going to have to start hacking the install routines or hitting the forums in the hope that someone else has tried it and come up with a fix for whatever obscure issues are thrown up? All that time costs money, and I just don't find it worthwhile. It's enough coping with API changes and breaks in new working versions of CUCM without worrying about whether CUCM installs at all ;-)

If a cloud provider with VMware is expensive, just get your own hardware. Due to the way that VMware works, the VMs will only know the capabilities of the physical processor - as long as you get reasonable Intel XEONs then you'll be fine and the brand/model of the server needs to support vSphere.

Hope that helps in some way!

Aaron