Thanks for clarifying some of that. The years of exerience in our Unity department combined are... low. Long story short, they've had a lot of trouble with people losing voicemails, delayed delivery, you name it we had it. So our IT Director is getting upset and concerned about the credibility of certain internal departments. As a result I think the Unity folks answer to have "zero voicemail problems going forward" is to tell me that the mailboxes can't ever be moved, ever, the server can't be turned off, ever, and the store can't be dismounted, ever.

I know not all of this is true. I'm not new to messaging or how third party applications utilize system mailboxes and the MAPI protocol.

If messages are in the UMR, are they later delivered once everything is reconnected? I believe they do because our Unity admin was adding some permissions to the unity install account and about 10 people got a weeks worth of voicemail all at once.

One more quick (maybe) question.

We have Unity in failover mode. Our Exchange servers are currently not clustered (will be after we upgrade beyond unity 5 and have exch 2010)

Does the entire voicemail system rely on the one single database that it's main system account is hosted on, to be running? That database goes down and voicemail is down? If that DB is down, and a users tries to fetch a VM, do they get the message saying "the messaging server is offline" ?

So, to answer your question about UMR - the short answer is yes.  The UMR is a component within Unity that allows outside callers to leave messages for users  when their primary Exchange server is offline. Messages are temporarily  stored on the Cisco Unity server in the \CommServer\unityMta directory.  When the primary  Exchange server comes back online, Cisco Unity begins to pass the  messages as normal into the correct message store.

Does the entire voicemail system rely on the one single DB that it's main system account is hosted on to be running?  So, the main system account is primarily related to UMR as it is the voice mailbox that originates voice messages from outside callers.  With that said, it's not so much the account being offline as it is the partner server being down.  Unity has a 3 primary service accounts that receive permissions within AD so it can function.  UnityInstall is the most powerful and is used for installation.  UnityDirSvc handles directory services on Unity and is also the account used on the backend when adminstrators make changes in the Unity web admin portal.  The last is UnityMsgStoreSvc which handles all of the messaging communication with Exchange.  The partner server is essentially a bridgehead for Unity.  I'm sure you're familiar with the term bridgehead so think of it this way, when that server is down - Unity doesn't have anyone to talk to on the messaging side.  If a user tries to access a message and the message store is down, they will typically receive an error of some type via the phone interface that indicates a "system problem" or something to that effect.

One key point I would make is that it's hard to manage Unity in an organization where the "phone" guys are the "phone" guys and the "AD/Exchange" guys are the "AD/Exchange" guys.  Even though Unity serves a telephony purpose, from the system perspective it is an active member of the AD domain and Exchange environment.  The majority of Unity's functionality depends on proper setup and integration with AD and Exchange.  In fact, at one point Cisco made it a requirement that in order to receive a Unity Support certification that the prerequisite was an MCSE (and the paper MCSE would have been of little value).

If I may ask, I'd like to know if you're set up for Unified Messaging (users get voicemail as .wav attachments in their Exchange inbox) or voicemail only (users are only accessing voicemail via the phone).  If you're in a UM environment with that many problems, that would be frustrating on all sides.  If you're doing a voicemail only setup and having that many problems, it would be worth the time considering a migration to Unity Connection which is a Linux-based appliance with no dependencies on an external message store such as Exchange (or AD either).

Hailey

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You're correct in all of your assumptions and everything you said makes perfect sense to me. Unity is very new to our business. We got the system last summer, so it's not even a year old. I wasn't there when it happened but I don't think any of our "unity guys" are formally trained. They are actually router/firewall guys, who got stuck with Unity because it says "Cisco" so it must be right up their alley, yeah?

We use Unity in what I'd call a "mixed" environment. Anyone who has a company issued smartphone has "unified messaging" enabled, so they get the .wav file. Only because most of them are never in an office or behind a real phone (read: insurance company with agents and adjusters, etc) That's about 500 people. Everyone else (1000+ phones and growing to more offices) just have a second AD account assigned as their phone.

We've had a LOT of problems. I am currently migrating to Exchange 2007. I had about 200 mailboxes moved over and had to quit because Unity was being a wack job. Turns out Unity needs to be paired with the newest version of Exchange... but nobody knew that.   You can imagine the headaches that brought on. When the Unity guy tried to home it to the new server, the TAC technician didn't tell him to disable the failover server, so before he could stop it, Unity created 468 new user accounts for peoples voicemail... More headaches. I was lucky enough to exmerge and SQL script his way out of that one!

Anywho. The Unity guys have been chanting about Connection but have not been able to really elaborate on why it's any better. Does it do anything for those needing access to their messages by their email inbox? Can it email them a link or a wav file? something like that? If it can't, I'm really aiming everyone at going towards Microsofts Unified Messaging system... it gives us a few other features that people are wanting (transcription, chat, etc) but it's not Cisco, so there are some naysayers.

/end.

We'll probably end up with Connection, and store and forward. Not sure how VM's showing up in a folder other than the inbox would affect users on mobile devices, but it's something to test.

I really appreciate your input. Gives me some ammo and power to start getting the kinks worked out of everyone elses systems. Typical me.

Thanks again for the help.