Move CUCM from BE6000S to Dell VMWare?

[Just Someone YKnow]

The Cisco BE6000S (M2) UCS/ISR is going end of life in December 2022.

Rather than buying a new Cisco-specific server running VMware just for these Cisco-specific VMs, I am looking into migrating CUCM and Unity onto our Dell server with 128 gig memory and 5 TB RAID-6 running VMWare, and other non-Cisco VMs for network monitoring and management.

Is there anything else beyond relicensing Prime License Manager / CUCM / Unity for the Dell VMWare host that needs to be done, to shut down the BE6000S completely?

• For the last two months, I've been running a test on the Dell hardware. I used VMWare Converter to migrate CUCM and Unity from the BE6000S to the Dell VMware, with CUCM set to high vCPU priority. It has worked fine, no problems except CCM and Unity complains it is out of license compliance with a 60 day countdown to correct it. At about day 55, I moved CCM and Unity back to the BE6000S.
• We have another vendor's router providing DNS, DHCP, NTP for our other VLANs, so I don't need that from the Cisco router that is built into the BE6000S.
• We are using 5 FXO ports on the BE6000S. If we will continue to do that, I see that it can be replaced with the Cisco 4321 ISR and two NIM-4FXO modules.
• I am looking into changing to SIP, which apparently needs the Cisco CUBE VM running alongside CCM and Unity on the VMware host. There should be np issues with the Dell VMware doing this too.

It doesn't seem like there should be any huge technical problems going this direction, and the only challenge is the software relicensing for the Dell server hardware.

[Jaime Valencia]

From a technical point of view, that's perfectly fine as long as your server meets the requirements outlined in the UC virtualization site.

I'd just reach out to your SE to discuss the licensing side, as BE licensing was a bit different from a regular UC deployment, and see how that would work with your future support contracts, not sure how they are going to handle it as it's going EOL.

I'd engage a reputable consultant or a Cisco partner WITH voice specializations to discuss the CUBE situation, if vCUBE would suffice your needs, or if you might need an actual ISR as your CUBE in case PVDMs are required for something.

[Elliot Dierksen]

@Jaime Valencia is correct about the licensing. There are also some special rules for VM's created using the BE6K templates. I think what is biting you is that the UUID and MAC address of the NIC are changing when you migrate the VM's that way. To stay in supported territory for ESXi, you need to follow the guidelines that are here. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/cisco-collaboration-virtualization.html 

You will be in a "specs based" configuration which means Vcenter is required and the CPU's have to be 2.5Ghz or higher. There are other qualifiers including IOPS on the storage. You should read all of that information. Also, here are some of my old notes on doing this prior to a Vmotion transfer of the guests. There may be other ways to do this, but I directly edited the VMX file from the CLI. I am an old Unix guy, so that makes sense to me. There may be other ways to accomplish this.

Add following after uuid.bios line.

uuid.action = "keep"

Obtain the Inventory ID (Vmid) for the virtual machine using this command:

# vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

Note: The output shows virtual machines which are registered on the ESXi/ESX host.

You see output similar to:

Vmid Name File Guest OS Version Annotation
2848 Win2003_storage_performance [local] Win .vmx winNetEnterpriseGuest vmx-07 To be used as a template

In this example, the Vmid is 2848.

Reload the .vmx file using this command:

# vim-cmd vmsvc/reload Vmid

[Just Someone YKnow]

As a small organization with 50 phones, 5 physical POTS plugged into FXO, and only CUCM / Unity, we are barely scratching the surface for what it can do, and I'm not expecting this is going to change. We will never use Cisco video phones, video conferencing, or Jabber.

We're only using the BE6000S because that was apparently the smallest product available from Cisco when our UC560 went end of life. vCenter is generally pointless as we don't have a SAN, so vMotion, vSwitch etc can't be used. Once we finish moving from Active Directory to M365 the building will have one Dell server running VMWare.

I am not interested in cloud hosted service because I cannot control incoming UDP QOS. If our download bandwidth is exhausted, people sound like robots and phones don't ring when the UDP packets are dropped by the ISP.

[TONY SMITH]

I would suggest a clean install onto the Dell with whatever profile you want, then restore configuration from a DRS backup.  You will then end up with a separate PLM instance on the Dell and it should be a simple rehost from one to the other.  Cisco Licensing will need licence requests from source and destination.  Do you currently have a support contract for the BE6000S, and do you need to have support in place after the migration?