Our telecom systems currently run on VMware, but we'd like to move away from it before the next renewal. We've considered migrating Cisco Unified Communications Manager to Nutanix AHV, but we keep running into support and compatibility concerns. For organizations already using Nutanix, are you setting aside a small cluster to run ESXi just for Call Manager, or have you found another supported approach? Running a separate VMware environment is something we'd rather avoid, especially given the licensing changes, while moving the call manager environment to Cisco's cloud offerings appears prohibitively expensive. What are others doing, and which options are officially supported today?
4 Answers
Nutanix has announced support for running Cisco Unified Communications Manager on AHV, but the timing and exact support boundaries matter. Cisco’s documentation and announcements have described broader support as forthcoming, so it’s worth confirming the specific CUCM version, AHV release, hardware platform, and support status before migrating. We’re planning to move an on-premises cluster to Nutanix after upgrading from version 14 to 15, but we’re still validating the details.
Cisco’s own NFVIS hypervisor may be another path to investigate. It’s based on KVM and is intended for Cisco collaboration workloads, with licensing reportedly costing substantially less than a comparable vSphere deployment. It still means operating a dedicated virtualization platform, but it may avoid maintaining a separate ESXi environment.
Some organizations have taken the opportunity to replace the Cisco phone system entirely. That can eliminate the virtualization and maintenance headaches, and newer platforms may require very little ongoing administration. The tradeoff is that CUCM often has a deep set of enterprise features, so replacing it may not be practical if you depend on specialized call flows or integrations.
Hyper-V generally isn’t a supported platform for Cisco Call Manager. The supported choices are VMware, Nutanix AHV where the relevant support has been released, or Cisco’s own hypervisor solution. Converting an existing installation to another hypervisor can also require boot and appliance changes, and an unsupported conversion may leave you without vendor assistance.
The main concern we’ve heard is that Cisco may restrict full support to Cisco-branded hardware running Nutanix, which could make the supposedly simpler option much more expensive.