Cisco Unified Communications Manager summary

By: Dennis Hartmann

Service provider takeaway: Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) is the call routing and signaling component of the Cisco Unified Communications solution. This section of the chapter excerpt from Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Part 1 will summarize the topics and concepts covered in chapter 1 of the book.

Download the .pdf of the chapter here.

The following list summarizes the key points that were discussed in this chapter:

• Cisco Unified Communications (UC) is a community of components designed to enable rapid, efficient communications. UC components include the following:
• Endpoints
• Application integration
• Call control
• Infrastructure

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) is the call-routing component of the Cisco UC ecosystem, providing call setup and teardown services to both voice nd video communications. CUCM provides a centralized command and control topology to configuration management while leveraging the distributed nature of IP communications.

• CUCM is a software solution that is supported on various hardware configurations. Media Convergence Servers (MCS) are Cisco-branded hardware solutions that run on HP or IBM server platforms.

• CUCM Versions 5.0 and later use an appliance model where most administration is performed on a client pointing to the web services running on CUCM. The hardened operating system is based on the Red Hat Linux variant. There is no access to the Linux kernel, and this lack of access provides a high level of security to the Cisco UC platform. CUCM versions before 5.0 (4.x and earlier) used a Microsoft Windowsbased operating system.

• CUCM database Versions 5.0 and later leverages the IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) to store all configuration data, including the user database. Versions earlier than 5.0 use a Microsoft SQL server database for most configuration information, while user information is stored in the DC Directory server. The DC Directory and the IBM IDS are LDAP-compliant databases.

• CUCM licensing consists of the license server and the license manager. The license server component runs on the publisher server, whereas the license manager runs on every server.

Reproduced from the book Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Part 1. Copyright 2008, Cisco Systems, Inc.. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., 800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, IN 46240.