Migrating CUCM 11.5 Publisher running PLM between VMware hosts

[James Hawkins]

Hi,

I have a customer who has a CUCM 11.5(1)SU2 cluster running on UCS C210 servers. The CUCM cluster has one Publisher and two Subscribers. The Publisher acts as the Prime License Manager for CUCM cluster and also a Unity Connection cluster.

I have migrated the CUCM Subscibers and Unity servers without any issues. However when I migrated the Publisher I had problems with the licenses in PLM.

My migration method is to shut down the server (after a backup), export the server as a single file OVF template to a Windows PC and then import the OVF onto the new UCS C240 server.

Before migrating servers I removed the Product Instances from PLM and before powering up the CUCM Publisher on the new VMware host I modified it's MAC address to be the same as that on the old server.

Now when I access PLM the Unity Connection licenses status has a message "Registration Conflict, contains migratable licenses" and the CUCM licenses have a message "Demo Licenses, will expire on............."

I guess that I can sort this out by raising a case with the Cisco license team but I am curious if there is any way to avoid these license issues and migrate the PLM server without any issues?

[James Hawkins]

So I think I have solved this.

The first time I imported the CUCM Publisher to the new UCS I told it to boot up automatically then shut it down to edit the MAC address then rebooted it. I think this confused PLM.

I deleted the imported machine then re-imported it to the new UCS but told it not to auto boot. I then edited the MAC address before booting and things worked ok.

Happy days!

[Chris Deren]

This is the reason your PLM node virtual machine needs to be configured with STATIC MAC address as called out in Cisco documentation, as licenses are tied to the PLM Mac address.