Questions to ask before a new Call Manager installation

[John Huthmaker]

Hey Everyone,

I'm getting ready to start the full design of my companies new phone system.  I need to come up with a list of questions to propose to my management for the design strategy.  I wanted to see if I could get a running dialogue from those who have built phone systems from the ground up of questions they would ask when planning a new design.  These would be questions like toll bypass, E.164 dial plans, private partitions, music on hold, gateway IOS versions, etc.  We currently use Call Manager 7.1 with Unity Connections, and UCCX.  We are not going to be upgrading this.  Instead we will be creating an intercluster trunk and building the new call enviornment from the ground up.  We will be brining everything up to the latest revision of 8.6.  Later on we will upgrade to 9.0.  With this upgrade we will be adding in a CUPS server so we can start using the Jabber client for instant messaging.

Thank you in advance to everyone who replies.

John

[Chris Deren]

John,

I hate to do this to you, but this is a very big topic as there are many, many questions to ask and consider when performing a new install discovery/design.  This is where years of experience come to play and if possible I would urge you to look for assistance from Cisco GOLD partner as design is the most important aspect of a new phone system rollout. In my opinion it is impossible to design a good solution when doing it for the first time, sure you can make things work, but it will quickly be apparent that some things were missed which may cause huge headaches.  We perform health checks all the time and mitigation on misocnifugred system, and you would not belive the type of deployments I have seen.

Just my 2 cents for what it's worth.

HTH,

Chris

[John Huthmaker]

I should have noted that this entire project is being done under the supervision of a 25 year cisco veteran with CCIE Voice, CCIE route/switch, and Cisco Certified Trainer certifications.  I could go back to him with this question, but I figured I would ask the community to get a running dialogue.  It's one of those huge questions that brings up many more questions.  I'm thinking of the topic more like the open source community.  Rather than asking one person, I figured I could ask a thousand all at the same time.

[John Huthmaker]

I'm surprised nobody has any input on this.  I would have expected lots of responses to this post.  I just want to bump it to be sure.

[Neal haas]

Depends on your environment.

4 digit or 5 digit Dialing.

SIP connection or PRI

New DID's or use Old DID's

Call queuing or not.

Voicemail?

New Devices or Existing.

Presence or Not

Call Trees or Not.

Lots of questions, Why not update what you have? Lot less of a headache

[John Huthmaker]

Thanks Neal.  Here are the answers to those question.

1) 4 digit dialing

2) Down the road it will be all PRI's.  Right now we will have about 600 users on PRI/POTS lines, and 400 on a sip trunk via a CUBE.

3) Old DID's, but we dont allow direct dialing.  All numbers either take you in to UCCX or a fax machine.

4) Voicemail will done with CUC

5) Existing routers switches and phones.  Servers are all new.

6) Presence will be added towards the end.  We don't currently have a CUPS server today.

7) We do have some calling trees based on specific office needs.

The reason to replace rather than upgrade is because our current voice enviornment is a mess.  Search spaces and partitions are all over the place.  None of our gateways are registered with Call Manager even though they are MGCP.  All of our gateways have useless commands on them.  SRST doesnt work at the moment.  Toll bypass is essentially non existent.  We dont want to bring any of our problems forward, and instead want to take this opportunity to start from scratch.  Our current enviornment was literally built over a weekend after our datacenter burned to the ground 3 years ago.  So it was really thrown together.

[Douglas Crane]

Little interjection from someone who just installed CUCM 9. CUPS will be going over to IM & Presence server. It will be more tightly integrated with the Call Manager and have better Jabber integration.

Also something to keep in mind is the new Licensing manager installed with 9. It is certainly a huge advantage over the PAK way of doing things.. Very nicely done Cisco! Much easier to understand.

Quick question. When you mentioned TEHO do you really mean Lowest Cost Routing? Or in fact using a remote locations VGW to make external calls?

Remember to consider that, that is in fact not legal in some countries. If it is strictly in the US then you are ok..

+E.164 numbers can be delt with on the transformation rules.. As a side note to that these transformations must be replicated on the application dial rules as well as the don't carry over. This involves have the appropriate COP dial rule wizard on hand then restarting the FTP service on each server in the cluster. That will carry your application dial rules over.. This of course is only needed if you are planning on using any soft phone clients.. I.e. CIPC or Jabber.

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[John Huthmaker]

Thank you.  This is great information.  All of our offices are in the USA, so dialing out over our local PSTN's would be legal in our case.  I do wish we were going directly to Call Manager 9, but I've heard its a little buggy, and we cant risk bugs in our implementation.  We'll probably look to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.1 when it becomes available.  All of our licenses include 3 years of software assurance, and we just purchased them about a month ago.

We do use alot of CIPC in our company.  We havent started using Jabber yet because we dont presently have a Presence server.  That will be new for us when we roll out this new phone system.

[Douglas Crane]

Hmm.. Not sure how's it is buggy.. I haven't run into any issues and I am running in a global production environment.

I only mention CUCM 9 because it has many new features including the new licensing that is a treat. Also CUP to IM & Presence is a migration not an upgrade. Not that big of a deal if you have the real estate for it on your UCS servers or are going to run it on a spare MCS. But still extra work..

Something to put your mind at ease though. Upgrading from 8.6 to 9 can be done live with the Publisher even the reboot. When done correctly. The Subscriber can be done live also but be prepared for a phone firmware update on reboot of that node. Of course this is assuming most of your devices are registered to the Sub!

Thanks for the stars

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[Douglas Crane]

BTW I can tell you Jabber is far superior to the CIPC. Desktop sharing and webcams and such.. Also much easier for users to understand! That is a big plus!

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[John Huthmaker]

This is fantastic information.  I havent seen any versions of 9 available for download.  How did you go about obtaining the latest revision?  I want to go back to my management and reapproach installing 9 instead of going to 8.6 first.

Is it possible to use the IM and Presence server 9 with Call Manager 8.6.

[Douglas Crane]

Hmm 7 to 9 huh... Go to 8.6 first then 9.. Few more hours of work but worth the safety! Also remember to do your DRS first!

CUMC 9 is on the PUT tool on Cisco. It has CUMC, Untiy Con, CUP and IM & Presence in the download! Word of advice don't look for a license file that is done with the built in license manager! Very cool!

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[John Huthmaker]

Thats awsome info.  Thank you sir.

[Douglas Crane]

No need to call me Sir.. I work for a living....

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[jeremiah88]

Great info provided to this point. I would add:

Consider upgrading to entirely virtual platform using Cisco UCS. I recommend boot from SAN, and take advantage of all the great VMware HA options.

Don't forget redundancy and srst

Fully globalized e164 dial plan with localization, AAR, TEHO, etc. complex and there is administrative overhead, but worth it.

I think you are correct to wait on 9.x, until first major patch is issued. In the meantime go to 8.6.2

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