UCS on routers

This has been around for a while, but now its official they are going to put CUCM inside of a router with contact center express. If you do voice this maybe a time to get strong with VMware and UCS in general if you haven't already.

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f0rgiv3n

I'm a CUCM noob but the voice guys at work are running something off of our Cisco routers right now.. i believe it's some sort of survivable gateway so the VoIP can failover in case the WAN goes down. What do they have right now that can go into routers as far as CUCM goes and how does it differ from this news?

shodown

What they are running is SRST which is a very basic form of keeping the calls on site if the CUCM goes down or you loose IP connectivity between the 2 devices. If you have full blown CUCM on site you can run the full feature set of call manager and other applications running so you can ensure incase of failure that site will not be affected as much.

In the past most people would just cluster another server over the wan for large sites as SRST just isn't enough to provide services when you are a large site 300+ users. Also any critical site if they had a failure it could be catastrophic for the company. I worked with a pretty large firm not so long ago where they had a branch office in Brazil that cook care of the money for all of south america. This site lost its phones a week before year end taxes and it took them 4 or 5 days to restore services. The late cost in taxes were more than 10x the cost of a call manager on site with redundant WAN connections. But as usual in business we also have enough time and money to do it over, but never enough time and money to do it right the first time.

skinsFan202

Is that the UCS express? I remember Cisco trying to push it as like an office-in-a-box solution with VDI & a windos domain controller virtualized in your router. Pretty cool to see they've incldued CUCM now too. guess it was only a matter of time.

I don't see how you can continue in voice without having any VMware knowledge especially now that Cisco's said they're no longer doing any bare-metal installs and going virtual only in CUCM10.0. Still trying to wrap my head around storage. SAN, nas, nfs, iscsi, fc, fcoe aghhh. all starts getting so confusing too easily. All the different TRC and spec-based configs for C-series still gets confusing for me as well. what configurations can handle X amount of UC VMs etc.

aaron0011

I agree anyone on the Voice track should be familiar with virtualization and would actually say everyone in IT should have at least some familiarity with it. It's used all over the place these days and isn't just for your Windows Server anymore.

@skinsFan202, yes. It's UCS Express.

I've been running our production Unified Communications environment for a few months now as VMs. It's absolutely fantastic for redundancy since my ESXi hosts are in a HA cluster. I am breaking one of the supported rules though. The UC VMs are on a NFS datastore to a SAN. NFS and iSCSI are not supported. Only local disk datastores or Fiber Channel to SAN. I do have a local disk datastore on the UCS server that is running all the UC apps so in a pinch I can move the VMs over to it from the SAN if needed...but NFS is working fine, and I prefer to be able use HA and vMotion with VMware and leverage hard snapshots on the SAN for first level backup.

pitviper

We have a few of the SRE-Vs running ESXi in our voice gateways – I even added them to our UC cluster. Not doing much with them at the moment (outside of playing LOL). I have a couple of large offices that need a Unity fail-over. Would love to run CUCM and CUC VMs on the backplane of the ISR2. Maybe that’s why Cisco recently pulled the Unity Express SRST licenses?

pitviper

aaron0011 wrote: »

I've been running our production Unified Communications environment for a few months now as VMs. It's absolutely fantastic for redundancy since my ESXi hosts are in a HA cluster. I am breaking one of the supported rules though. The UC VMs are on a NFS datastore to a SAN. NFS and iSCSI are not supported. Only local disk datastores or Fiber Channel to SAN. I do have a local disk datastore on the UCS server that is running all the UC apps so in a pinch I can move the VMs over to it from the SAN if needed...but NFS is working fine, and I prefer to be able use HA and vMotion with VMware and leverage hard snapshots on the SAN for first level backup.

You really don’t need to get too crazy with this – As long as you are backing your servers up via SFTP they are a snap to restore.

shodown

Yeah a lot of those fancy VMware features are not supported a the moment. Its best to make good backups and and restore from that point. Hopefully after I knock out the CCIE V, I can do some heavy Vmware, UCS, and LYNC. I would like to do UCCE, but its hard to jump into a UCCE role these days.

aaron0011

pitviper wrote: »

You really don’t need to get too crazy with this – As long as you are backing your servers up via SFTP they are a snap to restore.

Agree that SFTP target backups are simple enough to restore but with only those the VM would need to be rebuilt with fresh install first if lost. I can restore everything much quicker with snaps that run every night on the SAN. I do leverage SFTP backups in DRS for offsite backups though.

pitviper

But if you lose both your PUB and SUB servers at the same time then you have bigger issues

aaron0011

pitviper wrote: »

But if you lose both your PUB and SUB servers at the same time then you have bigger issues

This deployment is BE so clusters aren't supported.