CUCM 9.1(2) and the Jump Upgrade

As we move further down the road with Cisco UCM releases we are gifted with more and more "upgrade" variants. First came the Bridge Upgrade, followed by the Refresh Upgrade and it's counterpart the L2 Upgrade. Now we have the Jump Upgrade. These "Upgrades" are breeding like crazy but I guess variety is the spice of life. 

All of these upgrade methods serve a function and while I think Cisco's upgrade methodologies are overly clunky, the Jump Upgrade is a step (not a leap) in the right direction.

VMware vCenter Converter Saves the Day

While VMware vCenter Converter isn't really what I would consider a common Unified Communications (UC) tool, it is a handy tool for anyone that has a lab environment with guest virtual machines (VMs) on different flavors of VMware. I have VMware Workstation, Fusion, Server 2.0, and ESXi hypervisors running in my lab. 

This didn't happen because I am a VMware fanatic (well, I am a big fan, if that counts). It happened because I have been running Cisco UC applications in VMware since CCM 4.1. As anyone with a home lab knows, VMware was king of the lab before it became the ruling monarch of Cloud City!

But that isn't what this blog is about. No, what this blog is about is how VMware vCenter Converter saved me a lot of time by allowing me to move guest VMs from Server 2.0 to ESXi.