CUCM in Development network / licensing

[Jason Ward]

Hi all,

I'm going to skip past a very long and tiring story and get to a current problem I'm having. We are trying to replicate our production CUCM 7.1.5 into our dev network so we can test upgrading to 8.6 and any future work that we may need to perform going forward. We have managed to obtain licensing to accomplish this. However, we would like to build the system in VM.

The problem we're having is if I build 7.1.5 in VM the install succeeds, but when I go to register the license it warns me that 7 isn't supported in VM, and if I try to I'll burn the license.

We can't be the only organisation that has a development network. Has anyone out there successfully replicated the ir production CUCM 7 virtually?

Thanks in advance,

Jason

[Marwan ALshawi]

if its just for test and prove of concept then you can use the demo license which is up to 50 DLUs you can prove and test without the need for additional licenses

[Jason Ward]

Unfortunately this isn't the case. We want to test the update procedure, and you can't update without licensing.

[Aaron Harrison · Accepted solution]

Hi Jason

Generally I guess most people test specific version functionality - not the actual upgrade process, which one would hope (yeah, I know) Cisco have tested suitably.

You can test the new version by building a cluster at the version and replicating whatever config is needed to test it manually or via export/import (admittedly with some tweaking)

You can test the upgrade process by running it on your live server during a suitable period - the install/migration of data happens when you run the upgrade, and you aren't required to switch versions immediately; if you have an extended period before you want to switch versions you can simply run the upgrade again.

If it fails to switch or switches and you have problems, you can switch back if the problems are significant enough.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the upgrades now we are on the appliance model are far better; unless you are doing multi-hop upgrades you have a pretty solid backout and beyond ensuring we have a backup I don't worry about them much at all.

Now... all that said, the server is just a linux server. As I recall with v7 the system recognises VMware mac addresses; if you do a little linux research changing the MAC address is pretty easy. If it's a 'license MAC' (i.e. not the servers actual MAC it may be more tricky).

Aaron

[Jason Ward]

Yep, shows up as a license MAC even in 7. Hacking the MAC doesn't fix anything :/

Think I'm going to have to convince the powers that be that they'll have to run with demo licensing in Dev. Just have to work out how to get my hands on 8.6 installation discs now, as we're upgrading our prod system to 8.6 but can only download upgrade ISOs :/

Cheers for your help guys,

Jason

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi Jason

If you are entitled to PUT upgrades (i.e you have UCSS or whatever) when you order the 8.6 upgrade you get an option for edelivery. You get a link in the email when your order is complete (a day or two later) that allows you to download bootable media and the licenses etc from another download website at Cisco.

You could then use that to build your POC lab and to eventually do the upgrade.

Regards

Aaron