Cisco supports only VMWare ESXi virtualisation which makes sense!
Old versions of Call Manager (CUCM) were running on Windows Servers. The administrators could easily install on top, other applications, server roles etc., which made the Call Manager unstable and of course increasing support requests to Cisco.
Since CUCM 5.0 Cisco decided to move to Linux Red Hat. The more interesting thing is that they bundled together the OS and the Application, so you cannot easily access the native Red Hat OS, and of course if you do, Cisco will not support your Server. So what we are getting now is a light CLI and a rich Web GUI. So you don't have to know how to use Linux in order to administer Cisco Applications.
Cisco also did something similar with the hardware. Cisco Applications can run on specific servers that meet hardware requirements. After a few CUCM releases, Cisco started supporting virtualisation and as with software, we have to meet all theh ardware requirements to be able to have Cisco Applications on Business Environments.
Below you can see the table of the requirements for the latest CUCM Application (January 2019). We can see that only VMWare ESXi is supported and also only specific hardware models. The table shows Cisco appliances, but on the far right column you can see that third party hardware is also supported, as long as this hardware is actually supported by VMWare
So what if we try to install Cisco Applications on our home lab using Oracle VirtualBox.
This is what we get:
Actually we can trick the installation and tell it that we are using a VMware Virtual Platform. Let's do that!
Make sure that the Oracle VirtualBox application is not running, else the changes will not load and also will be discarded next time we run VirtualBox.
Go to C:\Users\<User>\.VirtualBox
We will update the VirtualBox.xml file, but before that
We will create a backup of that XML File.
We will add the code below
<ExtraDataItem value="Phoenix Technologies LTD" name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSVendor"/>
<ExtraDataItem value="6 " name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSVersion"/>
<ExtraDataItem value="VMware Virtual Platform" name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemProduct"/>
<ExtraDataItem value="VMware" name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemVendor"/>
Old versions of Call Manager (CUCM) were running on Windows Servers. The administrators could easily install on top, other applications, server roles etc., which made the Call Manager unstable and of course increasing support requests to Cisco.
Since CUCM 5.0 Cisco decided to move to Linux Red Hat. The more interesting thing is that they bundled together the OS and the Application, so you cannot easily access the native Red Hat OS, and of course if you do, Cisco will not support your Server. So what we are getting now is a light CLI and a rich Web GUI. So you don't have to know how to use Linux in order to administer Cisco Applications.
Cisco also did something similar with the hardware. Cisco Applications can run on specific servers that meet hardware requirements. After a few CUCM releases, Cisco started supporting virtualisation and as with software, we have to meet all theh ardware requirements to be able to have Cisco Applications on Business Environments.
Below you can see the table of the requirements for the latest CUCM Application (January 2019). We can see that only VMWare ESXi is supported and also only specific hardware models. The table shows Cisco appliances, but on the far right column you can see that third party hardware is also supported, as long as this hardware is actually supported by VMWare
This is what we get:
Actually we can trick the installation and tell it that we are using a VMware Virtual Platform. Let's do that!
Make sure that the Oracle VirtualBox application is not running, else the changes will not load and also will be discarded next time we run VirtualBox.
Go to C:\Users\<User>\.VirtualBox
We will update the VirtualBox.xml file, but before that
We will create a backup of that XML File.
We will add the code below
<ExtraDataItem value="Phoenix Technologies LTD" name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSVendor"/>
<ExtraDataItem value="6 " name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSVersion"/>
<ExtraDataItem value="VMware Virtual Platform" name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemProduct"/>
<ExtraDataItem value="VMware" name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemVendor"/>
Thanks for great information.
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