Running Cisco UC Appliances In Proxmox (i.e., CUCM, CUCS, Expressway, IM&P, CMS, CSR1000v)

[denjimar]

Hello, could you be a bit more specific? What do you mean by 'importation'?

 

[denjimar]

I mean the import of a running CUCM from ESXi. After the import you have to change the type of the vm disk to IDE, otherwise the start will fail.

So basically, what you have done in version 14 is convert the OVA with QEMU and import the disk IDE into Proxmox?

 

[twiederh]

So basically, what you have done in version 14 is convert the OVA with QEMU and import the disk IDE into Proxmox?

Yes, currently this is the only way to make CUCM above 14SU1 work on Proxmox. I have now spent numerous hours trying to figure out additional changes to the installation DVD but I am still at a stage where the installer complains that it can not determine the hypervisor environment. As a hint: you can use the recovery ISO. It uses the same detection methods as the installation ISO but allows you to connect via ssh, read the log files and even run some of the scripts to see the output directly and determine where it fails.
I made a couple of changes to the recovery ISO but all I achieved up to now is that the error message at the end is different.

In detail, I added a section for QEMU that mimics the one for VMWARE, which brings me further to the hardware detection but now I am stuck there, probably because I am using a Lenovo M920s and the manufacturer is not supported.

 

[denjimar]

Yes, currently this is the only way to make CUCM above 14SU1 work on Proxmox. I have now spent numerous hours trying to figure out additional changes to the installation DVD but I am still at a stage where the installer complains that it can not determine the hypervisor environment. As a hint: you can use the recovery ISO. It uses the same detection methods as the installation ISO but allows you to connect via ssh, read the log files and even run some of the scripts to see the output directly and determine where it fails.
I made a couple of changes to the recovery ISO but all I achieved up to now is that the error message at the end is different.

In detail, I added a section for QEMU that mimics the one for VMWARE, which brings me further to the hardware detection but now I am stuck there, probably because I am using a Lenovo M920s and the manufacturer is not supported.

I was able to bring up the VM, but I keep encountering countless errors.

 

[twiederh]

How much memory did you assign to the VM and how many cores? You should have at least 6GB and I would assign at least 2 cores. Also, the disk should be 110GB in size. Which version of CUCM exactly did you try?

 

[denjimar]

How much memory did you assign to the VM and how many cores? You should have at least 6GB and I would assign at least 2 cores. Also, the disk should be 110GB in size. Which version of CUCM exactly did you try?

Hello!

CPU 8 cores
RAM 10 GB

I tried on pve 7.4-3 and this happend

 

[denjimar]

How much memory did you assign to the VM and how many cores? You should have at least 6GB and I would assign at least 2 cores. Also, the disk should be 110GB in size. Which version of CUCM exactly did you try?

Hello, friend. This is working.

 

[darkponay]

Hi everyone,
Could you provide the steps that makes CUCM 15 working on Proxmox?
Thank you much

 

[denjimar]

Hi everyone,
Could you provide the steps that makes CUCM 15 working on Proxmox?
Thank you much

Installing from ISO has been very complicated for me. I managed to get CUCM15 working by exporting the OVA from ESXi. Then I extracted the OVA and converted it to QCOW to make it compatible with Proxmox.

Next, in the hardware configuration:

• 8 CPU Type: Host
• 16 GB RAM
• Network: vmxnet
• HDD: IDE

And voilà.

 

[darkponay]

Hello everyone,
Just tried your method denjimar and it works!
This is insane!!


The main screen is slow to load and then shows this, so i guess i'll have to find where to do some modifications.

 

[blaquelab]

I currently have CUCM 14 running, but the CPU and memory is constantly close to capacity. Does anyone know how to troubleshoot this? It currently has 8gb memory and 2 vcpu's. This configuration runs fine on my esxi host, but I'm trying to move over to proxmox.

 

[DMJC]

Hey, a few words of warning regarding this. (I'm a Cisco UC engineer with 10 years of Experience and 25 years of Linux).

Cisco TAC will not support your environments. This should not be used in production unless you are comfortable with having no support.
Also you need to try to patch your Call Manager/UC Product Installs - when you run the modification script to change ISOs to supporting KVM, you will break your ability to patch the products. Cisco has signature checking built into the ISOs and patches which will block the updates from applying and they do detect the modification to allow KVM installation (it's literally just changing a single switch statement from a no to a yes). I learnt this on my home lab and ended up moving to the free ESXi version as a result.

If you converted your VMs from VMWare ESXi, patching may work as I haven't tested this, but the modified ISO method definitely does not work.
Affected products are Call Manager/Unity Connection and IM & Presence Server. Expressway is supported by Cisco on non-ESXi hypervisors.

@blaquelab, you need to download the plugins/Real Time Monitoring tool from Call Manager and look at the logs. You may need to deploy a larger OVA size than you're currently running. Cisco have a Virtualisation sizing guide available here. They also have them for the other UC products.

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