Callmanger 4.x upgrade and unity upgrade

[ckness]

I would like to upgrade my exisiting enviroment  of two call managers sub and primary 4.x and one unity box 4.x to the latest version.

Options and questions are:

Upgrade old hardware to support upgrade.  _ not likely

Purchase cisco boxes   - not prefered

purchase dell servers and install upgrades on and migrate enviroment

VM some of the solution ,,,,

Whats the best versio to move to   is 8.x stable at this point... or should we go to 7.x   is there a good document or video on this migration since it changes alot and changes lic's ...

Thanks

Ckness@associated.org

[chrward]

Unity can be virtualized following the following guide:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/unity/virtualization_design/guide/cuvirtualdg010.html

CUCM virtualization support is around the corning (april is the target i believe). The CUCM virtualization comes with a few more caveats than the Unity product.  CUCM will require that you run VMware on the UCS if you want support. The B-Series is the big chassis/blade solution however, there is also the UCS C-Series, still unclear if CUCM 8.0 will support it or not, but it is more like the rack-mountable servers of old, however it is still intended for virtualization. That may be worth investigating. But certainly, for CUCM you have to at least wait until the 8.0 launch to get into a supported VMware config for CUCM.

HTH

[jarias]

Couple of questions in this post.

Version Recommendation?  UC 7.1 is the latest shipping release.   CUCM 7.1 and beyond contain the significant quality enhancements begun in 7.0.  CUCM 8.0 and Unity 8.0 do not FCS until Feb 2010.  Choice of 7.1 or 8.0 otherwise depends on what you need feature-wise.

How to migrate to new version? Start with solution-level docs at www.cisco.com/go/unified-techinfo - many of these docs will link you to appropriate product-level documents.  Of particular interest to you may be the System Install and Upgrade Guide at this location.  If you invest the time for Prepare/Plan/Design activity and follow our best practices, these migrations are frequently very smooth, other than the required downtime to perform the work.

Platform/server Recommendation?

o Re-use existing servers depends on what model you have - very old servers may not be compatible with 7.1 / 8.0 even if you upgrade components.

o Purchase new servers: CUCM does not support Dell servers.  For Unity, see its Platform Overlay documentation.  All MCS 7800 servers in CY10 are IBM based, but we also support "Software-only" on select HP and IBM hardware purchased direct from HP and IBM.

o Migrate to a server-virtualization-based solution: For Unity, see the Unity Virtualization Design Guide for what is supported.  For CUCM, support is not until April 2010 and is limited to CUCM 8.0 on VMware ESXi 4.0 on Cisco UCS B200M1 blade server with SAN storage.  Other storage/server options are on the wishlist but not committed at this time.