Unity Connection upgrade from 7.1.3 to 8.5?

[victoriabardy]

We are considering upgrading our unity connection cluster to version 8.5 from our current  version 7.1.3 and we are concerned about a few things.

1.  Compatibly between UC 8.5 and CUPS 8.02 and CUPC 8.5

2.  How to backup and restore current UC7.15 messages and user's VM name and greetings.

Does anyone here in the support community have experience with this version upgrade?  Would we be using cobras to back up and restore the messages?  Are there any "gotchas" we need to be aware of here?

Please let me know.

Thank you!

Rgds,

Vicky

[Rob Huffman]

Hey Vicky,

Hope life is treating you well

I can't address your first question (sorry)

But for your second question, this will be a "standard" Unity Connection upgrade

where all messages,greetings etc. will migrate to the new version without the use

of COBRAS or any other tool.(just like patching)

Cheers!

Rob

[victoriabardy]

Hi Rob,

Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, this is good news. Have you done this upgrade? If so what release of Call Manager are you (or were you) running on when you did it.

We are trying to flush out if we want to recommend the upgrade from 7.1.3 to 8.5.  It looks like the only benefit of doing the upgrade is the MWI sync when using SMTP forwarding in Unity Connection.  We know our mobile users will like this.  However we are still running on 7.1.3 on the call manager and we don't want to create issues by going forward with the upgrade.

If you have some feedback on this I would be very interested in hearing it.

Hope all is well with you.

Thank you again.

Rgds,

Vicky

[Rob Huffman]

Hi Vicky,

No worries my friend

We have not done this upgrade and do not have any current plans to do so. I am

always, always, always slow to move along the upgrade path. This may be a bad thing

but it has saved us some great pain as well over the years. Our current versions are;

CUCM - 7.1(3b)su2

CUC - 7.1(3b)su2

We have found these versions to be very stable. I have spent a fair bit of time looking at people's

migrations to 8.5(x) here @ CSC and have not seen or heard of too many horror stories. This is one bug you'll

want to look out for.

CSCtn61453            Bug Details

Applying 8.5.1 software as patch results in corrupted CUC installation.

Symptom: After fresh installation of 8.5.1 software, we can notice several problem symptoms. - Connection services and Connection DB does not start - System cannot be accessed via web page - Informix error messages for certain CLI commands Example :- show cuc cluster status com.informix.asf.IfxASFException: Attempt to connect to database server (ciscounity) failed. Command failed Conditions: It is observed during fresh installation of Unity Connection product when installation was started with earlier version of software and 8.5.1 software was applied as a patch during the setup process. Workaround: First, perform a fresh installation of earlier version of software using the install media. Then after verifying the installation, proceed with the upgrade to 8.5.1 as a separate process.

Status Open             Severity 2 - severe Last Modified In Last 3 Days         Product Cisco Unity Connection          Technology 1st Found-In 8.5(1)ES1

Best of luck with your changes.

Cheers!

Rob

[victoriabardy]

Your the BEST!  Thank you for this heads up.

Hope to chat with you again soon.

Rgds,

Vicky