UC applications aren’t only supported by Cisco on a virtual platform now, it’s the ONLY supported platform. As a “Collaboration Engineer” by title, I am usually focused on only a handful of applications, traditionally relying on the “Datacenter Guy” to provide the infrastructure and hope it works. But, it’s always good to see the whole picture.
In my opinion, virtualization is something everyone needs to know at least the basics of. You might not be the one adding a vlan to a switch anymore, but you still need to know networking.
Each VM contains two basic files: one .vmx (configuration) and one .vmdk (disc)
The .vmdk (disc) is considerably larger and contains all the bits a physical hard drive would. The .vmx (configuration) is a small, editable file containing all of the settings a physical bios chip would.
A few items you’ll find in a .vmx file:
numvcpus = “2”
memsize = “6144”
scsi0:0.fileName = “UCCX1.vmdk”
ethernet0.networkName = “Voice_VLAN”
guestOS = “rhel4”
sched.cpu.min = “1300”
sched.cpu.units = “mhz”
sched.cpu.shares = “normal”
sched.mem.minsize = “6144”
sched.mem.shares = “normal”
One task any Cisco UC Engineer will go through at least once is an upgrade from pre 8.6 to post 8.6 version. Two changes come about: an OS change from Redhat 4/5 to 6, and adapter change from flexible to vmxnet3.
One method is to edit the .vmx by finding it on the datastore, downloading the file, making the edits below, and import it back:
guestOS = “rhel6_64guest”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “vmxnet3”
An easier method if you are doing multiple servers/clusters at once is to use PowerCLI
Connect-VIServer -Server vcenter01 -User admin -Password pass
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Set-VM -VM ‘UCCX Pub’ -GuestId “rhel6_64guest” -Confirm:$false
Get-VM ‘UCCX Pub’ | get-networkadapter | set-networkadapter -type vmxnet3
