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VCS-C VCS-E End of Life

Hello Team,

I wanted to know the end of life of Cisco Video Communication Server Control and Expressway .

and also How to find the Product Number from VCS-C like (CTI---)

 

11 Replies 11

Patrick Sparkman
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

The VCS isn't end of life, and probably won't be for a very long while.

Product numbers are located at the bottom of the VCS Data Sheet.

What is that then http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/unified-communications/telepresence-video-communication-server-vcs/eos-eol-notice-c51-731300.html 

Might be I understood it incorrectly.

Will wait for your response Patrick.

That is the EOS announcement for the Gen1 appliance That was first released by TANDBERG. It has been replaced with an updated appliance based on Cisco UCS. Besides the UCS appliance, there is also a virtual version as well that can be run on VMWare. 

Our VCS devices are a mixture of TANDBERG badged 1U devices, and pretty much the same device but re-badged with the Cisco Branding. As far I we have been made aware, all these devices are EoL.

Chris it sounds as if you're TANDBERG and Cisco branded appliances are based on the Gen1 appliance released by TANDBERG, and if that's so, that it is EOS, but not fully EOL yet per the link Rishabh posted above..

It depends on how you read it. If your devices have maintenance contracts that have lapsed, and no new contract is taken out by September 2015, then that's pretty much your lot.

A lot of our supported organisations have taken maintenance, but equally a lot haven't, which is against our advice. Of course, given the age of these devices, we have also seen a few failures in recent times.

Unfortunately this 'EoL' announcement caught us with our pants down somewhat last year, and further our relationship with Cisco and understanding of their direction (on multiple fronts) has, and is failing too.

Hello Chris,

 

Please reach out to your Cisco Account Manager.  There are very aggressively discounted migration SKU's to move all your VCS's to virtual machines.  As with any vendor, hardware will eventually become EOL, but you are still entitled to the software upgrades for that platform - so you can migrate those to our Virtual VCS SKU's (R-VMVCS-C-M-K9 is the correct migration top-level-SKU to process this migration) and run them on any supported virtual platform.  Please let me know if I can assist you further with any other issues!

Cheers cbleeker,

We have but the response was less than favourable. We were essentially told that he/Cisco saw no future in our service and as such, talk went cold. As mentioned in other posts, I feel that Cisco have lost direction somewhat, which will lead to loss of custom.

Actually, this is an interesting topic of conversation as we have been lead to believe by both our reseller and Cisco representative (for want of a better word) that our VCS 'devices' are indeed EoL. It is true that the VCS will live on as software only Visualised Machines, but I fear that the hardware 1U boxes that proliferate our entire infrastructure will not support software revisions beyond x8 and maintenance will no longer be accepted very shortly. Switching to a VM essentially means re-buying everything form scratch as the transfer of licences amounts to pretty much the same thing.

We have our own maintenance plans as spare stock will cover us for some time to come, but we are working on other solutions that move us away from Cisco in the longer term.

 

Cheers

Chris

From what I've been told the VCS will always be provided in an appliance form as not all companies will want to expose their VM environment to the public internet, even when using a DMZ, so a dedicated appliance helps with security in that regard.  Which is why Cisco is providing a VCS appliance based on UCS.

Agreed.  The old hardware ones are EoS/Ld, but new ones can be purchased on the newer UCS hardware, and happen to run as a VM on that hardware.  We have one of those exact devices within our environment (as well as other "nomal" Virtual VCSes).

Wayne
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Wayne
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