CUCM in VMWare environment.

[Greyson Morrow]

We are currently running CUCM 7.0 on an MCS 7825 I2 box that will becoming EOL early next year. We are looking at upgrading to 8.6 and putting this on our IBM Virtual Server running the same VMWare that Cisco requires. I know Cisco requires dedicated resources for each machine but my question is does anyone run this scenerio with shared resources? We are looking to give it dedicated memory but use shared processor. On the current machine the CPU hovers between 10% - 15%. The current processor is Intel Pentium D 2.80 GHz.

So do you think with these stats that using a shared processor vs dedicated processor will work? We are also looking at bringing over Unity, CUCCX, and AQM and upgrading them to 8.6 as well.

[Michael Owuor]

Greyson,

Some considerations to keep in mind include:

1. Co-residency of Cisco UC virtual machines with 3rd party applications on the same physical server is not yet supported (but roadmapped).
2. Guidelines for UC application sizing include resource requirements such as number of vCPUs or cores are documented on the virtualization docwiki. Note that oversubscription is not supported. http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Unified_Communications_Virtualization_Downloads_%28including_OVA/OVF_Templates%29
3. Guidelines for deployment on IBM servers are documented at the following location. Make note of the CPU type (Intel Xeon 5600/7500 at 2.53 GHz of better), RAM, and other requirements that must be adhered to in order to be within the supported guideleines. http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Specification-Based_Hardware_Support
4. Make note of the customer responsibility regarding performance guarantees (bolded sections in the link above).
5. Perfomance guarantees are provided with Tested Reference Configurations on Cisco UCS platform http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6790/ps5748/ps378/solution_overview_c22-597556.html

Regards.