VMWare Cluster with Unity Connection or CUCM

[gary.hicks]

I have a customer with two C-200 Servers with VMWare ESXi 4.x installed.  He has one license for CUCM and 1 license for Unity Connection. Both are version 8.6.2

Does anyone know if there is any way to setup a VMWare cluster with the two physical boxes so that the CUCM and Unity Virtual Machines would work across both servers for true hardware redundancy.

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi

As I understand it, all the 'automatic' failover methods (vMotion etc) require SAN/shared storage...

If you have two seperate nodes you could simply shut down the servers, take a copy of each and copy it to the 'other' server (i.e. if CUCM runs on node A, copy the files to Node B) and leave the offline copy dormant. If you have a hardware failure, you can then restore your backup (which you will of course still be taking!) quickly by booting that dormant VM copy and performing a restore.

Not automatic, but quicker than a build/restore process.

Regards

Aaron

[gary.hicks]

Interesting thought here. Main issue I see is the license MAC address.  I rebuild the CUCM Virtual Machine on the same box and it did not have the same license MAC so I had to request the license files be rehosted.

[Aaron Harrison]

Ah yes... wonderful isn't it?

The MAC address is predictable, in a way. It's calculated based on lots of stuff you enter when you set up the server. If you enter anything different (e.g. capitalise something on the web cert info page differently) and you get a different MAC.

If you have copied the shut down server, the MAC is already set and a restore won't change it, as it's a restore of the same configuration.

Aaron

[afmmanicke]

As long as you rebuild the VM with the same information that gets hashed into the license mac address (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/rel_notes/8_0_1/delta/vmware.html#wp1054443)

you should be fine.   You could even pre build your that info which would generate the license MAC (http://www.cisco.com/web/cuc_afg/index.html)

[Aaron Harrison]

Yep - was just going to post up the answer file generator - you can use that to prove the theory. Run it, change anything, and see... it does list what is included in the calculation if you select a VM install.

http://www.cisco.com/web/cuc_afg/index.html

Regards

Aaron