One part of my job involves designing the virtualization model for our internal unified communications (UC) system deployments around the world. A critical task in this design is specifying which UC virtual machines (VMs) can share a Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) server chassis or blade and which ones can’t. When migrating UC servers to a shared virtual environment, we need to make sure we carefully balance each VM’s needs for CPU, storage, network and memory. Read More »

Tags: coc-collaboration, coc-data-center, performance, server, UC on UCS, UCS, unified communications, virtualization, VM

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

To serve our headquarters campus in San Jose, California, Cisco IT deployed one of the world’s largest Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM) clusters, with 9 pairs of subscribers and a publisher supporting this one campus. Together with these main 19-servers the campus cluster also includes Unity node servers, presence servers and management servers, for a total of 48 Cisco MCS 7845s. In June 2012, we migrated these legacy servers to virtualized machines running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers over a single weekend. Read More »

Tags: IP telephony, IP Telephony on UCS, IPT, migration, UC on UCS, unified communications, virtual machines

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

Changing voicemail systems--or the servers they run on--can be a big, time-consuming, and difficult task. Yet recently we did both.  We migrated our application platform from Cisco Unity 7.0 (2) running on Cisco 7800 Series Media Convergence Servers,  to Cisco Unity Connection 8.5 running as a virtual machine onthe Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. What’s more, we completed the cutover of more than 87,000 voicemail boxes to the new platform in a single weekend.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, migration, UC, UC on UCS, UCS, unified communications, unity, unity connection, virtual server, voicemail