CUCM 5.1 Licensing

[Saladin211]

Dear all,

I was hoping if someone could help me to verify what we have been told by a vendor regarding licensing, which sounded a bit strange!

We have CUCM 5.1.1 deployed and we are running out of Phone Licenses, as shown on the License Unit Report page of CUCM, and we of course are willing to increase that number and order additional licenses, however we were told by that vendor that that system of licensing is obsolete at Cisco, and we have to upgrade our Call Manager, and use the new "Licensing Scheme" which is by extension!

Personally I find that hard to believe. especially when I found this document from Cisco: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/admin/5_0_1/ccmcfg/b02licfu.html#wp1049680 which mentions something about obtaining the Product Authorization Key (PAK) when the phones are purchased and feed it to License Registration web tool on CCO along with the MAC address of the CUCM server,

We have recently purchased additional devices, therefore we are running out of licenses! so should the above process be done by the vendor who got us the new phones? since we don't have CCO authorized to do so. or are we stuck with the only option of upgrade?

Thanks in advance

[ronpatel]

Hi,

You may ask Cisco partner who is selling you the product to contact PH team and get the exact information.

Very good place to get licensing related query resolved is to contact PH team at cisco.com/go/ph.

The PH team of cisco will help your Cisco partner with the ordering

Regards

Ronak Patel

[Saladin211]

With all due respect, but I think I've made it clear what the partner has advised, as well as what I think of that partner's "exact information" so that's why I came here to verify in a way what we were told.

If however I could contact the PH team and get useful feedback (apparently not, since we're not a partner), without having them redirect me to the partner then indeed thank you for your response.

Regards

[Jonathan Schulenberg · Accepted solution]

The partner is mostly correct. Cisco has moved to user-based licensing and discontinued the device-based program (aka DLUs). As soon as you upgrade your cluster to 7.1(5) or 8+ your UCSS contract will be used to calculate how many User Connect Licenses (UCL Enhanced seats) you are entitled to in the new program. From there you could optionally uplift into User Workspace Licensing (UWL). These programs both provide a user-based license. The difference is that UCL is licensing a user for a specific feature/product while UWL is licensing the user for a suite of products. To address those phones and analog ports that cannot be attributed to a specific user (e.g. lobby phone), there is a public space and analog port license as well. A good analagy is licensing MS Word vs. MS Office. If you need more than one-two products the suite (UWL) is cheaper.

Your partner is accurate when they state that you can no longer purchase the legacy DLU-based licenses. This is to be expected as soon as a product version goes End of Sale. In the case of CUCM there is a temporary loophole: The new UCL/UWL licenses, while they are legally licensing a user, still generate DLU-based LIC files. This is only expected to last until CUCM 9.0 ships though. So, for the moment you can still add DLUs to your CUCM 5 cluster as long as you start buying UCL licenses. It's time to start a conversation about upgrading to a current release before you really do get stuck.

[Saladin211]

Thank you!

[Rob Huffman]

Hi Saladin,

I just wanted to add a little note to the great tips from Jonathan and Ronak (+5 each!)

You may have a few extra DLU's to get you by for the short term as Cisco usually adds

a small number of "overdraft" DLU licenses

The first thing to do is to check the License file you received from Cisco. Using notepad open the .lic file you received, it should show the overdraft licenses;

INCREMENT PHONE_UNIT cisco 5.0 permanent uncounted \

VENDOR_STRING=800000BCD4EE59D1.0

icFileVersion> \

HOSTID=000bcd4ee59d OVERDRAFT=40 \

NOTICE="200508261405391622 \

" SIGN="112D 17E4 A755 5EDC F616 0F2B B820 AA9C \

0313 A36F B317 F359 1E08 5E15 E524 1915 66EA BC9F A82B CBC8 \

4CAF 2930 017F D594 3E44 EBA3 04CD 01BF 38BA BF1B"

The preceding license file includes following information:

No expiration date for this license exists as indicated by the keyword permanent.

This license file provides 800 PHONE_UNIT licenses.

OVERDRAFT=40 indicates (5% of 800 ) allowed overdraft. Cisco determines the overdraft value.

The Cisco specific fieldLicFileID, identifies this license file.

You can add multiple increment lines for same feature (phone unit license or node license) in a license file to increase the license count. None of the INCREMENT lines should be identical and each of them should be signed independently.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/admin/5_0_1/ccmcfg/b02licfu.html

Cheers!

Rob

[Saladin211]

I apologize for sounding a bit of a noob, but as I'm getting to know better, seems that the new 7911 devices recently purchased by us should have shipped with the .lic file, and as a matter of fact I think we haven't recieved, and weren't informed of any (blame it on the weather).

In fact, the cluster has been implemented by a more professional partner a long while ago, and now the devices are purchased from another fresh partner.... and taking Jonathan's answer into consideration (specifically the loophole), could you please let me know how could we get those new devices' DLU's into our rusty 5.1 CUCM?

[barry]

Hi Saladin

What should have happened in version 5.1 is that you should also have purchased some DLUs along with the phones - these are separately orderable and do not come with the handsets as standard. It is quite possible to purchase 7911s without purchasing licenses so I wouldn't just assume that you have. Check what you have ordered...

The part codes for the DLUs are in the format

L-CM-DL-xxx or

where "xxx" is the number of DLUs that are required.

HTH

Barry Hesk

Intrinsic Network Solutions