call manager vs call manager express

[sarenos2006]

I have an installation for an office who will have 85 ip phones and then probably 30 or 40 more.

Which is the best option installing a cm express or a call manager ?

Is very different the pricing ? Which advantages will I have?

Is call manager installed in any cisco router as 2851 ?

[paolo bevilacqua]

Personally, I find CME to have an advantage on CM in terms of price and administrative burden (no additional boxes are required). No doubt, there are things that CM does and CME does not, but the gap is closing fast.

The feature is in all the IOS images. Licensing is another issue, you will need to take this up with your reseller.

[Chris Deren]

For this many users CM would probably make most sense. Couple of things to keep in mind:

1. do you need integration to any other applications, such as IPCC? If, so CME does not support it yet.

2. Is there a potential for growth? If so, you need to determine if this solution will be scalable.

3. What type of router is going to be deployed at the site, as number of CME phones supported vary depending on the model. Scaling from 24 to 240 phones. In order to support 120 phones you will need at least 3825, so this router may be an overkill for a small company, and couple of 7815 servers might make more sense.

HTH, please rate all posts!

Chris

[paolo bevilacqua]

Hello,

Even without hard data to support my opinion, I think the cisco guidelines for maximum number of ephones in CCME are very conservative, and can lead to oversizing the router.

You have to consider that for local calls, the media traffic does not even goes to the router. For external calls, it does, but then again, 2 full E1 PRI with no vad is just 6,000 pps. This traffic, the router would have to carry even if it used as voice gateway by the CM, so there is no difference in this.

Signaling/keepalive/maintenance also seem not to be CPU-intensive tasks for the router, expecially if it dedicated to the job.

[sarenos2006]

Thanks for your responses, the growth of the user, never will reach more than 120 phones, so I have thougth in a cisco router 3725, I want autoattendant and voice mail for the users so I have thought in Cisco unity express ( what I need is a AIM advanced integration module isn't it )

I don't need IPCC so I think the best option is cisco CME.

This configuration is for a town hall, where there are 9 buildings, all of then connected by wireless links in bridge mode. So we can treat everything as a great building.

The only doubt I have now is because one of the buildings belongs to the police and obviously they need redundancy or backup if the connectivity fails.

Which solution for redundancy do you suggest for the police building ?

regards

[muarrij]

I would probably stick with CME for this build, however you may want to consider an alternate CME for the Police dept. You can run t.routes between the two boxes and provide PSTN into the PD and also the Town Hall. The CME is also more reliable then CM at least until version 4.1. Hope that helps.