VMWare Upgrade on BE6k

[giuseppe.tetti1]

Dear all,

we have to upgrade CUCM based on BE6K from 10.5 to 12.5. Can you suggest me how to upgrade VMware installed on BE6K in order to upgrade the CUCM as well.

Thank you for your kind help.

Regards

Giuseppe

[mmoulson1]

Just looking at the virtualization guide for CUCM 10.5 is supported under ESXi up to version 6.5, so you could upgrade to this before proceeding to upgrade your UC VM's to 12.5.

You can download the Cisco custom ISO images for VMware from the VMware website and when you run the ISO on the server. You can choose to upgrade and preserve the datastore so your VM's are not lost! It goes without saying that you should take your own backups etc etc.

Once upgraded to CUCM 12.5 you could then choose to upgrade to ESXi 6.7 if you wanted. In practice you could probably upgrade straight to 6.7 with CUCM 10.5 but it's not officially supported.

The only thing I would add is if you are running CUCM 10.5 on official Cisco BE6K hardware then it is well worth checking what the EOL dates are on the hardware. In my experience if you are doing such a major upgrade (10.5 to 12.5) then the hardware is probably quite old? Something to think about anyway! Also make sure you have license to cover your VMware upgrade.

Hope that helps!

[mhurley131]

Can anyone provide a link to the Cisco ISOs on VMWare website?   Is there documentation on how to access those since I'm assuming they require a login.

[Ritesh Desai]

Hi,

Pls answer below questions;

What is the CUCM version you are running on BE6k?
Have you checked CUCM compatibility whether ESXi version you are planning to upgrade does CUCM supports?
What is the existing vmware version you have?
what ESXi version you are planning to upgrade?

[TONY SMITH]

The ISOs can be downloaded from VMware.  I don't know if this link works ...

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/6_5#custom_iso

Upgrade licence should be covered by your support contract with Cisco, from memory I think it's the contract for the BE6K hardware that covers it, rather than the SWSS on the licensing.