UC 8.5 Snapshot question

[balukr]

We have a customer waiting for their UCS C series (210 M2 I believe) servers to  arrive, since it is going to take more time to ship in the interim local Cisco  has offered two loaner servers to do the migration and move all UC products  later when they get their original servers.

My concern is one of the engineers  suggested to take a snapshot of all the UC applications running on the loaner  UCS C servers and migrate over to new UCS servers. What I have been told in all  Cisco trainings I have attended is we can't take a snapshot of any UC  application running on VMware or on any server and migrate over to other virutal  servers like we can do on any other servers/applications in virtual environment. 

Now my question is can we really take a snapshot of any UC products and  install/migrate on new Virtual servers? If we can will there be an licensing issues on  this ?

UC products that is going to run on UCS servers are

CUCM  version 8.5 (1 PUb and 2 sub nodes)

Unity Connection 8.5 (Primary and  failover)

Emergency responder 8.5

UCCX 8.5 (Primary and failover)

[clayostlund]

I work a lot in the VMware line of work.  Because each of your C210 servers will have Local storage, and i'm assuming you don't have Virtual Center configured for the two existing servers, about your only option is to shut the VM's on the loaner system down, Use the VI Client or another SSH based program to copy the VM Flat file from one machine to the other.  Then when you first power them on, it will ask you if you "copied, moved, or ....." the VM.  Just select copied and Vmware will create new security parameters for the VM on the new host.  You will have licensing issues as the Licensing MAC on the new system will likly change, but i'm not positive on this.

You wouldn't take a "Snapshot" of the VM's because a Snapshot is just a point in time where all new changes to the VM get written to a new VMDK virtual hard disk.  If you just copied that over, the VM wouldn't run becuase it still needs the original disk.

All you really need to make VM work after a copy is the .VMDK file, from there you can manually create a new VM without a hard disk and link it up to the old VMDK file.

Clay

[skilambi]

See here for list of feature supported by Cisco for UC. Snapshot is not supported except for Unity at this time

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Unified_Communications_VMWare_Requirements#VMware_Infrastructure_Feature_Support

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Unified_Communications_VMWare_Requirements#VMware_Snapshots

Thanks

Srini

[balukr]

Clay and Srini, Thank you so much for your help. Even though I have done some VMware servers and moves I didn't realize I can do the same thing with UC servers. Now I'm clear.

Thanks again .

Bala

[tony.salvador]

So is moving (copy) a VM of a UC application supported by Cisco?   I've done this in lab enviroments but is there any reason you shouldn't do this with a real production UC app (CUCM/CUCN/UCCX)?

Thanks,

Tony

[skilambi]

Tony

See here, that has changed now

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Unified_Communications_VMware_Requirements#VMware_vMotion

Each application varies and I would follow the table on how it works across the UC applications.

Srini