In an earlier post, my colleague Reid Bourdet described how we migrated our largest Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM) cluster to a virtual machine environment running on Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) servers.  This was the 19-node (server) Cisco UCM cluster that serves the Cisco headquarters campus in San Jose, California; and we completed the migration over a weekend.

What makes that move even more interesting is that we’re nearly done consolidating 5 separate clusters into one virtual environment, and reducing the total number of servers by a factor of four. Virtualization on the Cisco UCS hardware allows us to consolidate multiple UCM nodes on a single blade.  In this post, I’ll provide more details about the scope of this migration, the results we’ve gained, and how we’ll continue migrating other Cisco UCM clusters to Cisco UCS servers around the world.

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Tags: cisco mcs, Cisco UCS, cluster, coc-collaboration, server, UC on UCS, UCS, unified communications, virtualization, VM

Upgrading a critical enterprise call processing system to a completely new virtualized server platform sounds pretty tricky. Doing it from 5,000 miles away, in the public square of a sleepy Spanish village using your laptop and a VPN connection over the free municipal WiFi service sounds … well, maybe a little crazy. Recently, I did just that, migrating our Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) cluster in Johannesburg, South Africa to the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform from the small village in Spain where I was vacationing.

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Tags: anyconnect, change management, cluster, coc-collaboration, deployment, UC, UC on UCS, UCS, unified communications, virtual server

Cisco IT currently has approximately 21 Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) clusters worldwide to support our global voice communications in the production environment. Where we deploy these clusters around the globe reflects our user concentrations, their requirements for call performance, and the availability of and regulatory considerations for network infrastructure in different parts of the world.

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Tags: call manager, CallManager, cluster, coc-collaboration, CUCM, publisher, SRST, subscriber, super cluster, unified communications, Unified Communications Manager

Cisco IT maintains about 21 Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) clusters to support  150,000 hardware phones and 51,000 software phones used by our global employees, contractors and contact center agents.  In general, Cisco IT likes to stay up to date, and upgrades to most major releases of the Cisco UCM as soon as possible – frequently this occurs before the code is available to our external customers.  We do this to take advantage of new features and to help the product developers identify needed improvements before the release is made available to customers.

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Tags: cluster, coc-collaboration, CUCM, server, support, UC, unified communications, upgrade, Voice