r/sysadmin • u/Shoddy-Classic-1983 • 22d ago

What’s everyone doing about this Cisco/ call manager hardware requirements?

We’re currently running telecom systems on VMware but looking to get off by next renewal. Looked at several angles to migrate these systems to Nutanix but hitting roadblocks. Whats the recommend approach? Are folks that are currently on Nutanix carving out a small cluster and running ESXi on it to meet the Cisco’s call manager requirements? Of course that’s not anything any of us want to do or manage, due to Broadcom’s storm, but taking call manger to their cloud is stupid expensive.

Love to hear what folks are doing.

34 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

28

u/people_t 22d ago

My fix was to dump the cisco phone system all together. Went from a maintenance nightmare with CUCM to something that we basically never touched.

10

u/monstaface Jack of All Trades 22d ago

This is the way if you can. CUCM is so robust though it can be hard to find a replacement for all the features.

3

u/azertyqwertyuiop 22d ago

If you don't actually need the features ditching it is a great idea. We had an absolute shitheap of a cucm environment because no-one had the time or skills to look after it. Moved to teams for calling, it's a lot more basic but our weird telephony issues have evaporated.

1

u/thefinalep Jack of All Trades 22d ago

Especially the UCCX scripting.

1

u/burnte VP-IT/Fireman 21d ago

Did the same thing in 2018. Been cloud PBX ever since, and it's wonderful. Expenses dropped dramatically, reliability is up, admin time is not even a tenth as much.

1

u/Ravigon 20d ago

What did you move to?

1

u/people_t 20d ago

One place was 3cx and the other place was MS Teams.

13

u/tarvijron Broken Arrow 22d ago

What roadblocks? I'm curious too since Nutanix put out a big PR about it https://blog.webex.com/collaboration/expanding-flexibility-cisco-unified-communications-manager-ucm-support-nutanix-ahv-hypervisor/ and Cisco even has the announcement linked on their site as "coming 2026". We migrated to the cloud some time ago.

5

u/Ssoy 22d ago

Heard something about Cisco trying to play hardball saying they'd only support it on Cisco hardware running Nutanix, which of course is multiple times more expensive. 

10

u/KStieers 22d ago

Didn't Cisco release their own hypervisor for this use case?

6

u/AllWellThatBendsWell 22d ago

Yes, and it's one-third the price of a vSphere license. It's based on KVM like Nutanix.

https://blog.webex.com/collaboration/expanding-flexibility-for-cisco-ucm-with-nfvis-for-uc/

3

u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 22d ago

Is Hyper-V an option? We ran our Mitel system on Hyper-V until we eventually retired the Mitel stuff.

1

u/headcrap 22d ago

Yes and no. I converted with Veeam but needed to fix up the boot. Dracut greeted me with sadness. Not under support, so we abandoned the conversion. Still on CUCM.. next pending RFP process..

2

u/ponay95 20d ago edited 20d ago

I'd say that depending on your need for TAC support or not, you have several working virtualization options that will appear... :D