Questions - Unity integration with Magma box

[benjamin.ihekire]

I am currently reading up on Unity prior to actually carrying out an installation, where I have to connect the MCS-7835 server(primary and secondary Unity servers) to a Magma PCI Expansion Chassis(which houses two dialogic cards).

My questions are as follows:

1. How does one connect the MCS server running Unity with the Magma PCI Expansion chassis.

2. How does one know that the dialogic cards have been correctly installed and operating as expected.

3.Is there any special order that one has to follow when shutting down / starting up the Unity servers and the Magma box. Should the Magma box be connected to Unity server , up and running prior to installing Cisco Unity or connected after installing Cisco Unity.

4. Assuming that some sort of cable is used to integrate the MCS-7835 Unity server and the Magma PCI Expansion Chassis, what port on the Magma PCI Expansion chassis should be used, and how does the secondary Unity server interface with the Magma chassis.

[vkarney]

There is a high-density I/O cable in between a "Host" PCI card installed in the Unity server and a similar I/O card in a pre-determined PCI slot in the chassis. The Host card is Universal PCI, although 32b/33MHz, so it can be installed in any 32b or 64b PCI or PCI-X slot in the server. There are infrequent instances where the card may not function as expected in one particular slot in certain chassis. It is remediated by moving to a different slot. See this...

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/c_unity/unity40/tsg/tsg404/ex/tsg0650.htm#wp1042443

A simple means for verifying the functionality of the Intel/Dialogic voice cards is to use the Configuration Manager utility found in the Start menu under Intel/Dialogic to view resources. If cards are found by the Intel drivers then the interconnect works.

Each of those two I/O cards is a PCI bridge. The interconnecting I/O cable essentially stretches the parallel PCI bus itself out to the chassis simply adding more slots to what the server's South Bridge allocates resources during boot.

One should turn on the expansion chassis prior to the server is turned on and just after the server is turned off.

In a failover pair, each Unity server node would need its own expansion chassis. However, that does not mean that twice as many FXS ports are required at the PBX. Each PBX FXS port would simply be connected to a small RJ14 passive splitter. Two telcom cables drop from that splitter with one of each feeding to a port on each separate Unity server's FXO cards. In your case, you would have a need for two servers, two exp chassis and four FXO cards. If those FXO cards were the 12 port type then you would need twelve of those little splitters because each connector on a 12 port card carries two lines in its RJ14. See here for some example wiring diagrams...

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/c_unity/fail/fail401/ex/fg_400.htm

Hope this helps.

[benjamin.ihekire]

Thanks for your reply, it answers a lot. However I am a bit unclear about your reference to the Host PCI card being installed on the Unity server. Are you implying that the Host PCI card sits on the Unity server and the Expansion PCI card sits on the Magma Expansion chassis. And if so, what slot on server such as the MCS 7835(running the Unity software) should be used to house the Host PCI card.

Thanks