[cisco-voip] CM 8.6 to 9.1

[Tim Smith]

Hey mate,

I'm pretty happy with 9.1(2) being a fairly standard / stable release for my customers now.

ELM is actually pretty good.
It is much nicer having a central place to manage it.

I think the negative stuff about ELM, is the process of getting there.
If you don't have all your existing licensing and maintenance in order, and know whats what, there is a bit of a discovery process, and some to and fro with licensing team.

The simplest approach right now, is to build your new cluster, do your cutover.
Use your 60 day grace period licensing.
Generate your ELM license request and get licensing to fulfil it.
Once you are ELM, it's great.

Just be aware of the CUWL / unassigned licensing scenario if you use Ext Mobility. Make sure licensing team gives you additional licensing to cover (if you plan to use Jabber / IPC / mobility etc this will present itself as an issue)

Jump upgrade works ok - I've done one from 6.1 up to 9.1(2)
Caveats - make sure your old VM versions have the essentials - i.e. NTP (it wasn't required in 6.1 but it is required in 9.1) - the great thing about this is CUCM install doesn't check this before, so the upgrade goes through mostly, and fails at the last minute.
Jump upgrade is good, but can still be very time consuming.

Be careful of the time period involved at where you took the backup and when you go live..
i.e. if there is a week in between - you have to manage things like call forwards, extension mobility logins, CDR, config changes etc.
I like using Variphy here to help track changes.

Obviously quite a bit more to it than all of that, but there are a few things for you to consider.

I'm looking forward to 10 as well, I would give it some time out there first though. Get a couple of SU's out there :)
Also looking forward to the prime deployment manager - and see how this works in practice!

Cheers,

Tim

From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Scott Voll
Sent: Saturday, 18 January 2014 10:23 AM
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Subject: [cisco-voip] CM 8.6 to 9.1

how many people have made the switch to 9.x?

I hear a lot about ELM.  But how bad is it?

we are looking at going from physical servers to VM's.  we would like to do the "jump" upgrade were we build the new VM's and migrate users over.  Have people been doing this?  how has it worked.  What are things that were gotcha's?  Are you glad you upgraded?

I'm not a fan of going to a x.0 release but would it be good to look at 10.0?

TIA

Happy Weekend

Scott
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