Unity Connections Consolidation Question

[Jimmi2shooz]

Hello trusted Cisco community.  Has anyone out there ever performed a consolidation of 2 unity clusters, where you migrated mailboxes from a cluster within one region of the globe, over to another, whilst maintaining integration with 2 separate CUCM clusters?  

I am considering doing this, but would first like to hear from those who may have done something like this.  Any regrets lessons learned, etc..? 

We are on-prem unity cxn 11.5.  We have 4 CUCM and Unity clusters globally, but are considering eliminating some of our smaller/less subscribed clusters, by migrating mailboxes and call handlers onto our larger clusters.  

What things should we be looking out for?  I know latency will play a role. Anything with the method used to migrate mailboxes? Is COBRAS a good fit?

Thanks for any advice/suggestions.

[Roger Kallberg]

We did a similar thing a few years ago. For this we used Cobras and it worked without issue. No real lesson learned, it was pretty straightforward with no issues encountered.

[Jimmi2shooz]

That's encouraging, thanks. How far from the Unity Connections cluster, was your CUCM cluster for the migrated accounts? I am considering hosting our EMEA CM cluster's mailboxes on our US based Unity Connections cluster.
Also, other than installing all the necessary languages, was there anything you needed to do in order for the Unity cluster to allow the account import without issue?

[Roger Kallberg]

As we use AD integration all users where available to be setup in any CUC, so moving them to another CUC. With CUC you should have the option for a centralised instance, as such there should be limited issues with what you plan to do. For us we consolidated our users from mostly our DC in south of Europe to our north European DC and from our South America DC to Northern America DC, but we also moved a fair number of users to our Asia DC from the south European DC.

[Jimmi2shooz]

Thanks Roger.  This has been helpful!

[Roger Kallberg]

Glad to hear that. Please use the Helpful vote option if it’s been giving you helpful information and mark the applicable response as the answer to your question if appropriate.