Cisco Call Manager 11.5/6 migration to new hardware then upgrade to 12.5

[tcmckay]

I am in the process of upgrading the hardware for my CUC cluster and am trying to decide which path is best. My current hardware is Cisco approved but it is out of resources and warranty so in order to gain the benefits of 12.5 I have purchased new Cisco approved hardware for the the upgrade.

I am currently running the following:

CUCM 11.5

CUC 11.5

CCX 11.6

My plan is to migrate the current environment to the new hardware then upgrade to 12.5 across the cluster. Here are my questions.

1. Can I migrate the current vm's over then upgrade them?

2. Should I take down the Subscriber in the current cluster and add one new host then use the Publisher for configurations then do the Publisher in the same way?

3. Build the new cluster install the same software version for each vm then recover from backup?

4. Build the new cluster and install 12.5 then transfer all configurations over.

Which option is best for this type of upgrade/migration? I currently am running UCSC-C220-M3SBE and will be going to BE6M-M5-K9.

I appreciate your suggestions.

[Roger Kallberg]

Just move the VMs to the new ESXi host. The VMs aren’t tied to the host it was created on, they can run on any host, as long as it has the required resources.

[tcmckay]

So the new hardware comes with the latest version of UC installed. My version is 11.5. Should I move the vm's then upgrade or upgrade then move? My reason for not just spinning up the new UC and re-configuring them is that there are a lot of settings and I don't want to miss anything. However, when I saw that the vm's are already built I thought that might be a good option. What are your thoughts?

[Roger Kallberg]

If you want to move to new VMs then one option would be to do a DRS restore. For this you will require to follow the prerequisite, for example you need to have the same IP address, same host name and same version. Otherwise you can’t do the restore. Another option is to do a PCD migration. For this I can’t give much advice as I’ve never done this myself. Either way both of these are well documented, so you should be well covered.

[TONY SMITH]

I would move and then upgrade.  Remember you can move the nodes one at a time, for example you can probably move the Publisher without any downtime (depending on your cluster design).

[tcmckay · Accepted solution]

I completed the move this past weekend. I did the following to get this done:

1. Backup database

2. Remove CCM-Pub from inventory

3. Log into the CIMC web gui for the source host

4. Open the KVM and used scp to copy the vm over to the new host.

5. Add to inventory and startup..Select "I Moved IT".

This did take about 20 hours because we had 8 vm's in total to move. Once the first Publisher vm was moved I was able to initiate the move for a pub and sub vm simultaneously. Next will be the upgrade process.