Mark Holloway

The latest media from Cisco is 7.1.3a for Unified Communications Manager and Unity Connection. CUPS is now 7.0.5.  There are some things to be aware of when trying to load Unified applications in VMWare.  Here are the specifications for a successful installation.

NOTE: When performing the installation choose  “skip” when first prompted to use the Wizard.  You will prompted further into the installation to use the Wizard and at that time  you should continue.  Also note that each phase of the installation has estimated completion times that certain install tasks need to complete.  If you try installing too many instances of Unified applications at the same time this slows down your hard drive and uses more CPU which can cause these tasks to exceed their time limit.  When this happens the particular Unified application will hault and the installation will fail.  Best practice is to install each server one at a time and wait for it to complete before proceeding to the next application.

Unified Communications Manager/Unity Connection

VMWare Compatability 6.5 – 7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
1 CPU / 1 CORE
Memory 2048 MB
LSI SCSI Controller
80GB Hard Drive (Pre-allocated = better performance)

Cisco Unified Presence Server 7.02 or 7.05

VMWare Compatability 6.5 – 7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
1 CPU / 1 CORE
Memory 2048 MB
IDE Controller
80GB Hard Drive (Pre-allocated = better performance)

CUPS 7.0(5) will display a warning every time you boot the VM telling you that VMWare is unsupported.  You must agree before the boot continues.  7.0(2) does not do this and as far as I can tell, there is no compelling resson to run CUPS 7.05 over 7.02 in a lab environment.

By default Cisco locks down the UC Linux appliances so no one can access its underlying Linux operating system and obtain root access.  There are known methods to bypass this.  If you have already found a way then you may configure the virtual machine such as CUPS 7.0(5) so it does not force you to Agree to using the software on an unsupported platform every time you reboot.  This normally is not an issue if you are sitting in front of the VM while it is loading, but if you are rebooting remotely and don’t have access to the console then this is a problem.  Luckily the workaround is simple.

vi /usr/local/bin/base_scripts/hardware_check.sh and change the following:

if [ "$hwmodel" = "vmware" ];

to

if [ "$hwmodel" = "appliance" ];