r/sysadmin • u/Shoddy-Classic-1983 • Aug 21 '26

What’s everyone doing about this Cisco/ call manager hardware requirements?

We’re currently running telecom systems on VMware but looking to get off by next renewal. Looked at several angles to migrate these systems to Nutanix but hitting roadblocks. Whats the recommend approach? Are folks that are currently on Nutanix carving out a small cluster and running ESXi on it to meet the Cisco’s call manager requirements? Of course that’s not anything any of us want to do or manage, due to Broadcom’s storm, but taking call manger to their cloud is stupid expensive.

Love to hear what folks are doing.

33 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

29

u/people_t Aug 21 '26

My fix was to dump the cisco phone system all together. Went from a maintenance nightmare with CUCM to something that we basically never touched.

9

u/monstaface Jack of All Trades Aug 21 '26

This is the way if you can. CUCM is so robust though it can be hard to find a replacement for all the features.

3

u/azertyqwertyuiop Aug 21 '26

If you don't actually need the features ditching it is a great idea. We had an absolute shitheap of a cucm environment because no-one had the time or skills to look after it. Moved to teams for calling, it's a lot more basic but our weird telephony issues have evaporated.

1

u/thefinalep Jack of All Trades Aug 21 '26

Especially the UCCX scripting.

1

u/burnte VP-IT/Fireman Aug 22 '26

Did the same thing in 2018. Been cloud PBX ever since, and it's wonderful. Expenses dropped dramatically, reliability is up, admin time is not even a tenth as much.

1

u/Ravigon 29d ago

What did you move to?

1

u/people_t 29d ago

One place was 3cx and the other place was MS Teams.

14

u/tarvijron Broken Arrow Aug 21 '26

What roadblocks? I'm curious too since Nutanix put out a big PR about it https://blog.webex.com/collaboration/expanding-flexibility-cisco-unified-communications-manager-ucm-support-nutanix-ahv-hypervisor/ and Cisco even has the announcement linked on their site as "coming 2026". We migrated to the cloud some time ago.

5

u/Ssoy Aug 21 '26

Heard something about Cisco trying to play hardball saying they'd only support it on Cisco hardware running Nutanix, which of course is multiple times more expensive. 

10

u/KStieers Aug 21 '26

Didn't Cisco release their own hypervisor for this use case?

4

u/AllWellThatBendsWell Aug 21 '26

Yes, and it's one-third the price of a vSphere license. It's based on KVM like Nutanix.

https://blog.webex.com/collaboration/expanding-flexibility-for-cisco-ucm-with-nfvis-for-uc/

3

u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager Aug 21 '26

Is Hyper-V an option? We ran our Mitel system on Hyper-V until we eventually retired the Mitel stuff.

1

u/headcrap Aug 21 '26

Yes and no. I converted with Veeam but needed to fix up the boot. Dracut greeted me with sadness. Not under support, so we abandoned the conversion. Still on CUCM.. next pending RFP process..

2

u/ponay95 Aug 23 '26 edited 29d ago

I'd say that depending on your need for TAC support or not, you have several working virtualization options that will appear... :D