[cisco-voip] Thoughts on Major UCM/UCCX upgrade

[Frank Arrasmith]

Sorry for the mis-communication, yes, we still are retaining our support
contract through Cisco, however, we have found that, particularly with UCCX,
our skill level has grown enough, that the issues that we have encountered,
end up getting escalated to cisco anyway, so our VAR just ends up being the
middleman and seems to slow the process down.

Ed,
  Please let me know how your upgrade goes, as that is pretty much how we're
going to do it.  We are doing the bridged upgrade from an older MCS server,
to the UCS B-series blades.  Since its virtual, and we have plenty of
hardware space and some pretty good ESX guys, we talked about just building
a whole other UC system from scratch, depending on the time frame that is
decided. We would migrate our scripts over, other than that, my engineering
group would build, without the help from our VAR, which has been little help
since they installed the initial system, and that would give us the
opportunity to enhance our skill level across the board, since the other
thing we did, since the migration from TDM to VoIP, was merge our Network
and Telephony groups, into one big Network/Voice Engineering team.  This
way, the router guys get to learn VoIP, and the Voice guys get to learn
Route/switch.  This has proved to be very beneficial to all of us.  Good
luck with your upgrade, and I will be sure to post our results as well.

I just have to say, this forum has been a great resource for me and my team,
in both learning new technologies, and best practice methods.  Thanks again
everyone.

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Scott Voll <svoll.voip at gmail.com> wrote:

> Frank--
>
> I think your saying you would not pay for support through your VAR but
> still have a Cisco Support contract.  Is that what you were saying?  if so,
> that is what most of us do.  The VARS in bigger customer environments tend
> to be less knowledgeable then the in house engineers  which makes just doing
> it with Cisco an easier venture.
>
> YMMV
>
> Scott
>
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Ed Leatherman <ealeatherman at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi Frank,
>>
>> 1- I'm working on this right now myself. I am on CUCM 7.1.5, UCCX 7.0SR5
>> 2- Hope not :)
>> 3-
>> I am building separate UCCX as my existing hardware has reached it's
>> end of life. moving to VMware on UCS C series.
>>
>> High level procedure right now for me looks like:
>> - obtain all licensing ahead of time (use answer file gen for the UCCX
>> license MAC)
>> - run PUT on UCCX
>> - Run thru some caveats for CUCM (disable Ext Mobility, make sure last
>> backup was good, etc)
>> - Install "ciscocm.refresh_upgrade_v1.0.cop.sgn" on all CUCM nodes
>> - Upgrade CUCM per instructions (this looks like it will take a long
>> time to do on 6 nodes)
>> - Power down UCCX 7 servers
>> - Install UCCX 8.5 on primary
>> - Install any SU's on UCCX as necessary (there is currently an SU1 out
>> there)
>> - Configure primary node, load the PUT file onto it
>> - Follow post install steps such as JTAPI resync, Desktop Client Config
>> Tool
>> - Test call centers out make sure everything is relatively sane
>> - Install the HA server per instructions
>> - Run UCCX Desktop Client Config Tool one more time to get the HA server.
>>
>> 4-
>> I wouldn't attempt a major upgrade like that without a support
>> contract with cisco, in case something blows up in your face. We do
>> all our upgrades in house, but we do keep our ESW contracts current.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ed Leatherman
>> _______________________________________________
>> cisco-voip mailing list
>>
>> cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
>> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
>>
>
>
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