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CUCM Call Redundancy

msmalik
Level 1
Level 1

Hello,

we are in a situation where we have to shut down a couple of CUCM instances for a few minutes.  Including CM1, CM2 & CM4. 

All the phones ( not more than 100) have CM1 & CM2 as their active and standby CMs.  Out of this cluster, only CM3 will be active at the time. 

Please see the output of the webpage of one of the phones below,

Unified CM1172.19.110.12 Active
Unified CM2172.19.110.13 Standby
Unified CM3172.19.110.14
Unified CM4172.19.110.15

The question is would the phones still be able to make and receive calls? Noting that the only active CM3 does have call manager services active on it. 

Thanks

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Yes they will still be able to make calls. The recommendation would be to turn off the CMs with a gap of time in between, so that the phones have time to pickup that the node has disappeared from the network.

A device always has an active connection with two CM nodes that acts as call processing engines, one active and one standby. If one of these disappears from the network the device will form a connection with the next in line node, in your case CM3. If it’s CM1 that disappears the phone will directly make the connection with CM2 active and put CM3 as the standby. If it’s CM2 that disappears the device will keep the CM1 in active state and put CM3 as standby. With this the device always has a connection with two CPEs and will switch between these with zero interference to the service. If you were to turn off both CM1 and CM2 at the very same time there would be a period of time before the device would pick up that both CPEs has disappeared from the network and trigger the connection with the third CM in the list. This will cause a service disruption.

As you can only have three CMs selected in a CMG, Call Manager Group, the forth CPE in the list would come from the SRST configuration in CM, aka it would reference an IOS gateway that acts as a fallback device, ie SRST, Survivable Remote Site Telephony.



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b.winter
VIP
VIP

If CM3 is in the CM-group assigned to the device-pools of the phones, then the are able to work normally.

What should this sentence mean: "Noting that the only active CM3 does have call manager services active on it."

I think the OP meant to say that CM3 is at the time the only active cluster node that runs the Call Manager service. At least that’s how I read it.



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Thanks, Roger, that's exactly what I meant. 

At the moment the phones are all connected to CM1. 
When CM1 is shutdown, will they lose connectivity and register again?  or will continue to operate as normal 

The phone will not re-register or drop any active call as long as they have an active connection with one of the two CPEs, ie the active or standby.

I updated my original response to add some more details.



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Thank you so Much Roger. 

So since the CM3 is part of the CM-Group assigned to Device pool, as long as we turn them off with a bit of gap i guess we will be okay. 
Our major concern right now is to avoid any downtime. 

Correct. As explained as long as the device has an operational connection to one of the two CPEs, active or standby, it would not cause any service disruption.



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Hi Roger, 

I raised the same question with TAC and the engineer is saying that there will be a downtime even if the device switches between the CPEs, active and standby. (which didn't make sense to me).

Please see the TAC engineer response below;


"At the moment, CM1 is Active and CM2 is standby. When CM1 is shutdown, phones which are connected in CM1 will get unregistered and CM2 take few minutes to get back the phones to re-register .We can’t avoid downtime, few minutes is needed for phones to get re-register to next CM.

Any active call during the re-register time may get effected."

Can you please comment on this. Thanks Heaps 


I don’t agree with that outline from TAC. From my experience the UX of the phone would be a short blip on the display as it changes the active CPE node, but it would not have any significant noticeable effect and if there would be an active call it would not be visibly affected. In fact we’re doing this each time we do an upgrade of our CMs as we then shutdown each one of the cluster nodes in a timed sequence to create a clone of the VM. This has no visible effect on the services for end users.

Likely the best thing for you would be to see this in action yourself by scheduling a maintenance window and test it out by turning off on CPE node for a short time period. If you have the possibility to temporarily make a specific CPE active for a small amount of devices so that you have a controlled group of phones affected that would be the best, but if not it not a big deal.



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As you're question is answered I would appreciate if you took the time to give helpful vote to any response(s) that you feel deserves this and also mark the post as solved.



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yes CM3 is part of the CM-group assigned to device pool.

Will the phone re-register or will the active calls drop ? 

Yes they will still be able to make calls. The recommendation would be to turn off the CMs with a gap of time in between, so that the phones have time to pickup that the node has disappeared from the network.

A device always has an active connection with two CM nodes that acts as call processing engines, one active and one standby. If one of these disappears from the network the device will form a connection with the next in line node, in your case CM3. If it’s CM1 that disappears the phone will directly make the connection with CM2 active and put CM3 as the standby. If it’s CM2 that disappears the device will keep the CM1 in active state and put CM3 as standby. With this the device always has a connection with two CPEs and will switch between these with zero interference to the service. If you were to turn off both CM1 and CM2 at the very same time there would be a period of time before the device would pick up that both CPEs has disappeared from the network and trigger the connection with the third CM in the list. This will cause a service disruption.

As you can only have three CMs selected in a CMG, Call Manager Group, the forth CPE in the list would come from the SRST configuration in CM, aka it would reference an IOS gateway that acts as a fallback device, ie SRST, Survivable Remote Site Telephony.



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