What equipment is need to build a CUCM lab at home?

[jeanSD]

Hello, my apology for not posting a technical question. I'm a Avaya tech who wants to learn Cisco CUCM by building a mini CUCM home lab.  I'm seeing a lot CME  lab kits on Ebay however, I believe CUCM and CME are completely different from each other correct?  If so, is it feasible to build a CUCM lab at home and what is the basic gear needed to do so?

[Jaime Valencia · Accepted solution]

Correct, CUCM runs on a a Linux build, RHEL or CentOS on newer releases.

CME runs on IOS.

For a true CUCM environment, which I would recommend to avoid running into issues and trying to work around issues, you need to meet the requirements outlined here:

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/cisco-collaboration-virtualization.html

See 3rd column.

CUCM is not free to download (no bootable media is posted, and you need a CCO with a valid contract for updates), to do this legally, you'd need to be part of a partner to get an NFR kit and licensing for it, otherwise, CUCM would only run for a limited amount of time before locking any MACD and you'd need to reinstall and re-configure to get more time.

[jeanSD]

What would be the best way to get familiar with the basics of CUCM
virtually?

[davisjaron]

I'm building a lab right now with the only real investments being a dell r610 server I bought from a sporting store in st louis that was going out of business for $100, and a Cisco 2921 router I bought from an e-recycling warehouse for $50.  I am a voice engineer, so I already have access to the bootable .iso's, so that wasn't an issue for me, but might be for you.  I downloaded VMWare ESXi 6.5OU3 from the VMWare website as a trial, also using the CUCM trial license, and the router trial license.  I will have to reinstall everything in a few months to continue it, but I will have backups of all of my configurations for a simple restoration.

As I've been building my home lab I've been blogging about it on my website www.ijustcant.today.

I've got a few posts I'm still editing but will be posted soon about configuring CUCM, configuring my CUBE, and configuring "a call".

[Chris Deren]

For home lab purposes you can get a decent server from eBay for couple hundred bucks, I have Dell server which I got for $400 couple of years ago allowing me to run 6-8 virtual machines at the same time with no visible performance issues. You may just need to look around for sometime to find a good deal, plenty of resellers out there selling out old inventory which is ideal for labs.