[cisco-voip] CM 8.6 to 9.1

[Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List]

Sorry for the late response.

I actually just went through a modified jump upgrade from 7.1 to 9.1 (2) SU1.  We had a Pub and Sub for CUCM, Unity, UCCX and single instance CER.  We eliminated UCCX during this process, standardized names, changed IP's for organization purposes.  The process was fairly seamless.  During the migration we even went so far as to do AD integration from Call Manager and Unity Connection as we had the time, and it was an end goal.  We also went through the migration from Unity 7.0 to Unity Connection 9.1.  And because we didn't have enough to do, we even migrated our phone subnets from 6 scattered /24 subnets through our internal network into a contiguous /21 so we could easily mask and route these subnets (including voice servers and routers) with a single statement.  I also migrated and consolidated analog ports from nearly 10 year old version 1 VG248's to 2911 routers with FXS ports on Amphenol connectors.

This was a 3 week project over the holidays for us (mostly cleanup and documentation) with 5 major cutovers in a 10 day period of time.  VG replacements, Migration from 7.x to 8.6 for call manager, implementation of Unity Connection 9.x and migration from Unity.  Upgrade of Call Manager to 9.x and subnet changes for all phones.  We moved from various aged MCS servers (H2 through I5) to SPEC based virtualization on HP hardware.

Gotchas we ran into were self-induced mostly by previous administrators, however I can claim DRS and directory integration.


*         Analog ports suck.  Especially when there are a crapton of them with no labels.  Make sure you spend a significant amount of time standardizing and properly documenting.  Setting descriptions is an awesome idea.  Also analog devices that run into the ceiling and then connect to nothing are just as awesome.  Especially after 75 foot of twisted pair...

*         If you have old DN's or phones spend the time to clean them up.  Users and Voicemail boxes too...  Translation patterns.... Legacy CTI route points...  Pretty much everything.

*         We had to go through the process of resetting cluster security passphrases for application groups.  This was made extra fun, by the fact that our Call Manager Servers had no internal CD drive (removed) and all USB ports disabled as well...

*         Our prior Unity platform was a separate AD domain with broken DNS living on the same servers.  That sucked and required correcting tombstoned domain controllers (Unity SUB and PUB).

*         When changing IP's of Call Managers at the 8.6 cutover, we ran into a metric crapton of phones which some brilliant admin had statically set the tftp servers on.

*         We have some old 793x (non 7937) polycom phones.  Those required a manual kick to update the firmware and change the IP of the dhcp provided tftp servers.

*         Damn it Attendant Console.  I still get to deal with the complaints about the new ACE instead of what our switchboard team used previously.

*         When we enabled AD integration from call manager (including directory), we ran into users who had the IP phone attribute wrong.  That was a fun 3 hours correcting 500 users.

*         ELM was a little bit of a pain... a previous administrator of the system decided that UCSS was not something he needed to renew, or in the case of CER and Unity the actual base licensing, and skipped renewing one or the other.  We went through all the nightmares and 5 TAC cases to get licensing moved from legacy mangled licensing to the new CUWL (via upgrade licensing) and ER licensing on ELM for UCM and Connection.  I'm pretty sure my AM hates me now.  Did I mention that our ESW, UCSS and Licenses were all on 5 separate contracts, so we had to get those shenanigans sorted out before PUT OR ELM was even a VIABLE  option?

*         Common Device Configurations and Common Phone Profiles are amazing.  Bulk Administration most definitely saved my bacon on this.

*         Post upgrade we ran into issues with DRS.  We moved directly from the staging/migration network onto the production network.  Should have rebooted.

Overall fairly seamless, however it was a very long cutover week.  For the Add, move/change, removal process simplification this was completely worth it.  However the Unity Connection voice is a little grumpier and I have had several users semi-jokingly ask "why is my voicemail so hostile."  I am patiently waiting the ability to actually do unified messaging from Unity.

I would do it again in a heartbeat.  Any further questions, please let me know.

Thanks,
Blake

From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Scott Voll
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2014 4:23 PM
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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