Cisco Unified CME
Sep 22nd 2009carltonUncategorized
Cisco VOIP is sort of a defacto thing because Cisco is the world’s greatest marketing company. Their position is not completely without merit however as anyone who has had to deal with production networks might attest. While there are a few really good choices, Cisco is a consistent leader when it comes to product quality and support.
There are two main parts I have been working with lately, related to our VOIP deployment in our New York office. First is Cisco CallManager Express (CME). The second is Cisco Unity Express (CUE). CME handles call routing, phone registrations and loads, and configurations. CUE provides voicemail and auto attendant. It can do more, but that’s outside my scope.
CME
CME is pretty simple. Since this runs directly on IOS on the ISR router in my lab, I started by upgrading to 12.4(24) IOS. Then I downloaded the 7.1 CME software and installed it on the router. Things pretty much happened by themselves as far as adding the code to the device and getting to the point where I could offer the necessary services like tftp and call manager and SIP. I basically just followed the installation guide and started getting a feel for how to add phones and whatnot from the command line interface. Later, after installing CUE and getting it running, what I found is that the integrated GUI for both CME and CUE was pretty convenient for adding phones, etc. Oh, and remember, the CME is self restricting based on the ISR platform you are running it on. On a 2811, you are limited to 42 ephones (numbers/lines). On a 2851, you can add more than that.
CUE
I want someone to buy me a new wig. I pulled ALL my hair out trying to figure out the incomplete and enigmatic licensing process for the 7.1.1 CUE. This was ridiculous. What I know now is that 7.1.1 licensing is brand new for Cisco and all the tools for it are pretty much just not complete yet. A mixture of my being new with the software and the license process not being fully fleshed out by Cisco led me to lose my hair. A friend at Cisco helped point me in the right direction, first by pointing me to the cisco licensing site: http://www.cisco.com/go/license. Since I installed 7.1.1 fresh out of the box, what I needed to do was go through the “Migration tool” at the bottom of that page. This was not intuitive because I didn’t have a license to start with. This was generated for me from the serial number and part number of the box. The whole PAK number or whatever it asked for by default is part of what is not yet implemented. Also, while it SAYS it will email it to you within an hour, you better hit the download button it provides. I never got an email.
The CUE NM module is interesting in and of itself. It is a PC on a blade that slides into an NM slot and works like other ISE modules you will work with. It has 8 soft ports which you divvy up by licensing. These ports connect the NM-CUE module to the innards of the ISR router, specifically the CME application . There were three licenses I had to think about in my case:
- Voicemail Boxes
- Voicemail Ports
- IVR Ports
The voicemail boxes are self explanatory. We bought 75 licenses for those, so when I went through the license tool I told it to give me 15 units of 5 licenses each on voicemail. The second two items are of particular importance. You divide the number of soft ports (which is a hard limit on the module) up between number 2 and 3 above. I didn’t know that — at all. It was painful, but once I was told (again, the same friend at Cisco) it all made perfect sense. Since I am not using IVR in my system, I opted to set the number of IVR ports to 0. This allowed me to activate the voicemail application on the module which in turn allowed calls to transfer into voicemail instead of getting a busy or fast busy signal. The command I used was “license activate ivr sessions 0″. Then I reloaded the router. When it came back up, I was able to go into the ccn application voicemail subsection and configure “maxsessions 8″. Then dialing my VM pilot number got me to the voicemail attendant. She sounds cute.
This may seem simple to you, but trust me, with the maze of documentation, it was not obvious to me.
Overall
I have to say, there really isn’t all that much to this. I still need to figure out the voice vlans, qos, the site to site tie for local toll dialing to Atlanta from NY and all the Fujitsu integration and other things. But just to get a local network talking is a piece of cake. Most of what I have left to work out are the finer details of the deployment plan which are all subjective decisions to some degree. What we have will work and work well no matter what we decide about a million other details.
I have not yet figured out the custom background images for our 7945 phones, but I am not worried about it. At least I won’t be completely unprepared when the consultants show up to help stage the gear. I want to write me some applications to run on the phone, and the message of the day banner will be really fun. I want ours to say “Carlton is the greatest!”