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Being a VoIP Security researcher, I need seamless access to variety of Call managers. Its always better to have a small lab setup in your home for offline research requirements.

When one think about setting up a low budget, realistic lab, virtualization is the first thing comes in the mind. Today i will walk you through the step by step installation of Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7.0 under VMWare. Though this post cover installation of CUCM 7.0, all the installation steps can also be applied to installation of Cisco 6.x UCM.

Before we start for the actual installation procedure, following are some of the prerequisites for Cisco UCM installation.

• Minimum 80 GB free Hard disk space
• Minimum 1024 MB RAM
• One network interface.

Unlike CUCM 4.x, Cisco UCM 6.x and onwards are based on CentOS 5.x .

My Laptop Configuration

• CPU: Pentium 4 2.2 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo.
• RAM: 4.0 GB DDR2 RAM
• HDD: 320 GB SATA HDD
• NIC: Broadcom Fast Ethernet Card
• OS: Windows 7
• VMware Version: VMware Workstaton 7.0



VMWare Configuration

• Guest Operating System: Redhat Enterprise Linux 4
• Physical Memory: 1 GB
• Hard Disk size : 80 GB of HDD with files splited into 2GB files. Splitting of file helps improving memory Management.
• Network Card: Single Ethernet Card configured in “Brigde mode”.

Before you begin, you will need installation DVD of Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7.0. CUCM 7.0 ISO image is also available on piratebay. You can download the torrent from link provided in reference section of this post.

Following are the exact steps for UCM 7.0 installation. I have provided screenshots for some of the installation steps.

• Start the virtual machine and after a while Cisco UCM installer will warn you saying unsupported platform detected. It displys following box saying CUCM installed on VMWare will not be supported by TAC team and will not be used in product system environment. Click “Agree” and proceed.
  The good part about Cisco is even after detecting VMWare, it is allowing user to continue with installation procedure.

• Select Cisco Unified Communication manager as a product to be installed and hit “OK” and proceed with installation.

• Installer will now ask to complete pre-installation tasks, hit “skip” to start actual installation procedure. Installer will now install the Redhat base operating system with required packages like – JAVA, struts, Apache-tomcat, Perl, Python etc

Once base installation is complete, post install script will do the actual UCM related setup and configurations. These includes -

• Installation of UCM specific scripts
• Installation of UCM database

Installer will restart the virtual machine and again continue with the installation.

• Installer will ask if you have pre-existing platform configuration files. Hit “Continue” to proceed further and create new configuration.
• Select “No” to apply upgrade patch installation.
• Select “No” to import data from windows version of CUCM.
• Select the timezone and let installer negotiate ethernet NIC speed.
• Select the default MTU size.
• Select “No” to DHCP server installation and set hostname/IP address of UCM server. Setup will restart the network environment and continue.
• If you have valid DNS server setup in your network. Select “Yes” to enable DNS client on UCM otherwise select “No”.

• Now configure Administrator Username/password and provide information needed to create self signed certificate. This information includes – Organization Name, Organization Unit, Location, State,Country
• Choose “yes” to setup UCM as first node in the UCM cluster.
• Choose “No” to skip external NTP setup and in the next screen Configure Time settings.

• Configure Security password used for secure communication between two UCM nodes.
• Select “No” for SMTP configuration.

• Configure login credential for Web console administration. This step will complete the UCM platform configuration.
• Now UCM installer will install remaining script and complete remaining configuration. This step usually takes 40 minutes for completion.

• If everything goes right, installer will reboot the virtual machine and greet you with login prompt.
• Now start firfox and browse https://ucmipaddress to login in UCM web console.

• Click on System->Licensing->License Unit Report to view license unit allocated for your newly installed UCM.

Starting UCM services and adding devices

Now we have our UCM installed, lets activate its services to make it fully functional. Unless we activate UCM call manager and TFTP services; we will not be able to add/register any devices with our call manager.

To activate the services -

• Browse https://<ucmip>/ccmservice and login with admin credentials.
• Navigate  to Tools->Service Activation sub-menu.
• Select all services and click on “save” button to activate selected services.

Once UCM services are activated, CCM Node License feature will decrement 1 CCM license unit. Now let’s try adding one device to our newly installed UCM.

• Go to https://<ucmip>/ccmadmin
• Login with admin credentials
• Navigate to Device->Phone menu and click on “Add new” button from top left corner.
• Select appropriate phone type, protocol along with phone details like MAC address, device security profile, button template.
• Click “Save” to add device

Once device gets successfully added, appropriate DLU’s will get consumed from the available license units. Above screen shot shows DLU status after activating UCM services and addition of single 7960 IP phone.

As you add new devices and activate different services on UCM, respective DLU’s gets consumed. Once DLU count reaches to zero, you need to purchase new DLU licenses from Cisco.

References:

• Download Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7.0 ISO torrent.
• Download VMWare workstation trial version.