Running a single VCS Virtual Machine on dedicated hardware

[Chris Swinney]

Hey all,

As has been pointed out in another post, the EoL announcement has been made for the VCS physical appliances - of which we have 50 dotted around in various locations. However, whilst it maybe possible to host the VCS-C as a VM in or supported organisation server farms (assuming the strict hardware requirements and CPU:vCPU and memory mappings are met), hosting the VCS-Es maybe another matter.

With us, these are logically located outside of an organisation in an MPLS cloud and physically we have several devices located in different location - there are no hosts in place at these locations that could host the VCS-E. So, we would essentially look for a single host server to run a single instance of a VM - hmm sounds a bit like a single use appliance! Even the Small Cisco server would be massive overkill for this. I'm guessing a small general use Host that meet the requirements for ESXi would suffice, but it all seems a little silly to me.

Does anyone have any other thoughts?

Cheers

Chris

[Wayne DeNardi · Accepted solution]

The EoL announcement (Link) is only for the Generation 1 Physical appliances.  There is still the option to purchase the VCS-Control on the UCS C220 hardware (CTI-CE500-BDL-K9).

Wayne
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[Chris Swinney]

Cheers guys. A lot of our VCS were from the Tandberg days, so I'm guessing they are the older hardware. I only have basic access to them at the moment, but I can't see anything on the web interface show hardware version. I don't know if there is a command I can run from the terminal to check this, but I will look tomorrow.

Wayne, I pop the idea to multiple mac minis into the smelting pot and see what the bean counters say .

[Wayne DeNardi]

Hi Chris,

I haven't got any of the newer ones to test on yet (we're about to order one), but on the older device, if you do an "xstat sys hard" it shows the hardware version "1.0" - a Virtual box shows the version as "VMWare", so I'd expect the newer hardware to show something different.

Edit: This also shows on the web interface - Status > System > Information - Hardware version 1.0

Wayne
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[Chris Swinney]

Edit: This also shows on the web interface - Status > System > Information - Hardware version 1.0

I can't believe I missed that and I must have look at that page over and over. Was very tiered.

Still, have checked out a few of out VCSs and they all all v1, so pants. .

[Martin Koch · Accepted solution]

I do not know what you need performance and licensing wise. Guess the BE6000 or the bare C2Xx

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/unified-communications/business-edition-6000/index.html

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/index.html

series could be interesting. Besides that, like you said, everything which matches the ESXi and VCS requirements should do.

Btw, my home lab vcs run on a mac mini with native esxi, but sure I would not recommend that for
a production environment ;-)

At least you have till the 15th of sept 2015 (which I think is not very long) to get software fixes and till 2019 to get hardware support, so you have some time.
Till then its due to look into more CUCM related stuff anyhow.

[Martin Koch]

Like I said its a licensing question as well. If he needs something new and small with

the view to CUCM a be6000 can be handy. If he wants to transfer his licenses to something

else than a UCS C24 or something like that can be handy. If he wants to stick with a physical

box and needs new VCS licenses the VCS-UCS220 bundle might be ok, ...

Chris: check with your Cisco contact or partner to plan what to do.

[Chris Swinney]

Hey Martin,

CUCM is not on the cards.The long and short of it, it will all depend on costs. There was even some discussion today of letting maintenance slip completely and rely on spare units that we have on hand. We're not big fans of Cisco at the moment and so are looking at alternatives.

I think the nail in the coffin was with the release of x8 and that our expectation from both our partner and Cisco direct was that this would enable Lync 2013 integration is the same fashion that could be achieved with Lync 2010 and x7, but using H.264 SVC/AVC and HD video, however, after realising that this would only work with the requirement of the Microsoft Collaboration licence  and that the licence would cost £25,000 per deployment (and really if you followed Cisco's preferred deployment guidelines would really cost closer to £50,000 per deployment), so for 50+ possible deployment this could come to a cool £2.5m , we kinda though - naaah.

Interestingly, the options are coming from StarLeaf (ex Codian) and Pexip (ex Tandberg).

I know this diverges from the original thread, but I just had to get this off my chest.