Unity to CUC migration, intersite links?

[BEN ROBINSON]

Hello!

We have two locations, connected via 3 MB circuit and both sites are on the same AD forest, Exchange domain, with local servers at each site.

Currently there are two separate Unity voicemail servers in the organization, with one at each site and not in a failover scenario. In order to migrate these Unity v7.x boxes to CUC v9.x it appears that using intersite links is the best option? I read also that you first must upgrade at least one end to Unity v8.x.

Is my thinking correct here? Does anyone have any experience with doing this and any caveats/gotchas you may have found? Opinions? Thanks!

[Chris Deren]

What are you needing to do? Do you want to consolidate both Unity systems to single Unity Connection?

If so take a look at COBRAS tool at ciscounitytool.com which can do just that, no need to integrate any systems or upgrade existing systems.

HTH,

CHris

[BEN ROBINSON]

Thanks for the reply, Chris!

We need to keep them separate systems at each location, not part of a cluster - I don't believe we have the capacity on our pipe to cluster it anyway. Thoughts?

[Chris Deren]

Why not upgrade them both to UCXN and create intra-site link, that makes the system look like pretty much one.

Chris

[BEN ROBINSON]

The sites are very far apart (CA and HI) so I was hoping to do one upgrade and do an intrasite link to the other Unity and then eventually convert the other Unity over.

[Chris Deren]

Sure you can do that, but Unity is a dead product so sooner or later you will need to upgrade it to UCXN, also intra-site link is not the same as splitting UCNX cluster across WAN, intra-site link does not have high bandwidth and low latency requirements. I have customers with intra-site links spanning the entire globe, i.e. UCXN cluster in US, Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.

HTH, please rate all useful posts!

Chris

[BEN ROBINSON]

Right. We just don't have the resources to do both sites and the client workstation at the same time, so we were thinking temporary inter-site link with Unity until we can get that upgraded. No caveats or gotchas that you have run across?