Guidance for BE6K hardware refresh and upgrade

[Mujeeb Shaik]

Hi all, 

Trust you are doing well, 

I am tasked to perform the following actions for one of my customers:

Migrate cucm 11.5 BE 6K from their old UCS c200 server to a new hardware platform UCS c220 M4.

Facilitate hardware server level redundancy by recreating the same subscriber , cuc , I'm & p VMs on another new c220 M4 server and place it at a geographical location , and finally cluster them over the WAN.

Kindly let me know what licencing and right to use and perform requirements should I verify, consider and validate before starting on this.

Secondly, if there are any guides, tools or a resource which can help me simplify and understand the process of the complete activity and assist me getting it done, please direct me to them.

With Immense gratitude,

Mujeeb shaik

[Jaime Valencia]

To move the VMs from one server to other you have the same options, no matter the HW you will use.

DRS, vMotion or manually moving the VM files. For CUC, you can also use COBRAS.

[Kim Nielsen]

Hi Jaime,

We are also moving from old c210 servers running ESXi 5.0 to new HW running 6.5.

I made an TAC request, asking for "best practices" for moving to the new ESXi server. A topic that I can't seem to find much about.

What we have looked at is these 4 options.

- Using vCenter to cold migrate between the old ESXi servers onto the new ESXi servers
- Using a shared NFS to copy the files of the shutdown virtual UC serveres from ole ESXi to the new ESXi.
- Copy the files down to an PC using the Hypervisor/WinSCP, for then to uploade the files to the new ESXi servers.
- Using VMware converter / Cisco PCD to move/migrate to new ESXi servers.

TAC replied with the DRS option.

Would that also be your option? We have 2 clusters containing 16 virtual CUCM servers that we need to move, and the DRS would take a really long time. :(

Ideally I would have liked for Cisco to mention the vCenter as the optimal option.

\Kim Nielsen

[Jaime Valencia]

My answer when someone asks me for the "best" or "recommended" option to migrate or upgrade is:

There is no such thing, there are options, and which one is the "best/recommended" option for you, depends on your environment, what you have available, and what you want. They all have cons and pros, and you need to find one which works best for you.

Any of the 4 options you mention and DRS, for a total of 5 will get the job done.

If you have vCenter, have no problem shutting down the VMs to vMotion them, have redundancy configured to handle the load while you vMotion the machines, and your VMs are supported in the target ESXi release, vMotion is fine.

vCenter is not required for TRC, and the default license that ships with them does not entitle you for vCenter, it would be hard to position vCenter/vMotion as the "best"option for most people.

[Kim Nielsen]

Hi Jamie,

Good political answer. ;-)

But your are right, they are all options, but the problem with having options, is that if something goes wrong, then the customer is the first one to ask if it we have followed "best/recommended" option as prescribed from Cisco.

Have been trough my share of "major incident rapports", where we have to pull out papers to argument for having done things correct.

Would have loved to have a more detailed description/guide on this topic from Cisco's side, because it must be something that most virtual UC deployment goes through.

DRS is okay, but when talking Mega Clusters running 24/7, then it is at lest an double/triple up on time consumption.

I my case, because it is such a big cluster, I'll probably press for having the vCenter installed. The extra cost for having me drive out to every datacenter, plug in my pc for transferring 200GB from one esxi server to another, will probably be able to pay for an vCenter.  

Cisco TAC have also replied back, and now listed all 5 options, and not only DRS. That gives me the option to actually choose something beside DRS.

The customer would not have accepted going for anything else than cisco "recommended".

Appreciate that you replied with your take on this Jaime. :)

Thanks.

\Kim

[Vaijanath Sonvane]

Hi,

1. Verify you have active SMARTnet contract on Cisco UC licensing. If you do not have active contract then you need to purchase upgrade/migration licenses.

2. Verify that the new UCS C220M4 comes with pre-instaleld VMware and VMware licenses. Make sure you select right VMware license type if you want to manage new UCS servers from vCenter Server.

3. Open Cisco TAC Case prior to the migration and let them know you need new licenses for this migration.

4. For this migration, you can use Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment (PCD) tool. This will be much easier and simpler process. Go through the Cisco PCD documentation.

I hope this will help.

Thanks,

Vaijanath S