Unity trimming messages off before they are finished.

[Michael_6835]

Hello All:

I have a Unity 4.2.1 server working with CCM 4.1. We bought an matching server for our Unity Box. The intent was to have this identical box to keep offline in case there was a failure on the Online system. We could just switch the offline version on and not have any down time. We took a server image of Unity and deployed it to the offline server. We shut down the Online server and booted up the "offline" (now online) Unity server. Unity started up and within minutes Voicemail was working again. We thought great, but then reports started coming in that the ending of messages were being trimmed off. When we tested it, it looked like the final 2 secs of any message was being trimmed in mid sentence.

I looked around this site and I saw a few things but nothing with a solution.

I did however, see that Unity was licensed to the MAC address, which got me to thinking that it could have been a licensing issue, because the MAC address was different. As we were just testing the scenario, we did not want to call to switch the license over not knowing if it would fully work. What confused me is that why would Unity and voicemessaging work if the servers MAC address has changed ? We have since had to power back on the production machine which everything works as it should. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. Thanks

Also no error or messages in the event viewer. Win 2000 server

Thanks M

[Tommer Catlin]

You have two problems here:

Unity license is tied to the MAC address. This will cause Unity to probably not work on your "backup" server you mirroed, unless you bring the NIC(s) with on on the backup server.

second problem is probably your NIC card settings on the backup server. They should be set to Fault Tolerrant if you using dual nices, Force to 100meg full duplex at the card and on the switchport settings. (also on your exchange server, etc) If these are not set or you have something different, audio may get lobbed off or broken up.

question, if you have a "backup" server, why not just configure failover and leave the two servers online (off box messaging then also). Then the license will transfer automatically, gracefully failover to the secondary Unity server

[Michael_6835]

Thank you for responding with your suggestions, looks like licensing is probably what the problem is. The nic settings were set to auto, so I will change that as well. (But looking at it, it negotiated to 100full as the wire the port is configured for such.

I do not know too much about Unity server beyond, setting up user accounts, and setting greetings for holiday, etc. When we have an issue, we usually call them for a quick answer or Cisco. I was not aware that Unity could be set up for failover, (didn't even cross my mind) Would it be a Microsoft cluster ? or does Unity have its own unique clustering service.

Thanks again.

M

[Christopher McAlpin]

A Unity server that is running in demo mode, or with an invalid license will only take 30 second messages.

[Tommer Catlin]

nice post!

[7aelahi]

In Windows you can always override a NIC?s MAC address. In your scenario you could have documented the MAC address of the working Unity server then enter that same MAC address on the backup Unity server.