Cisco Unified Communications – Home Lab (VMWare Settings)

Let’s start tuning your virtual machine. While in VMWare, select the tab for the virtual machine you want to modify. Double click the memory option and ensure your virtual machine has at least 1GB (1024MB) of DRAM allocated to it. The minimum recommended DRAM requirement of CUCM 5.x and 6.x is 2GB, but I have found that CUCM runs well with only 1GB in small lab environments. To verify how much DRAM your platform has Choose the Start > Run from the Windows OS. Type in winver and click enter. At the bottom of the dialog box, notice the “Physical memory available to Windows” section. This is the amount of DRAM your PC has. 1GB is approximately one million kilobytes (1,000,000KB). Since my machine has 4GB installed, Windows reports that it has 3,667,864KB available. 32-bit Operating Systems can only address the first 3.5GB of DRAM. I comfortably run both CUCM and Cisco Unity on my machine since each OS requires 1GB. The Hard Disk maximum size is set when the virtual machine is first created. I’m not aware of a way to change the hard disk size without deleting and recreating the virtual machine. It’s recommended to make the maximum hard drive size much larger than anything you anticipate using when first creating it. If you know how to change the hard disk size, please share this information in the blog. By double clicking the Hard Disk option, you can access the Utilities drop down menu which has a defragmentation utility. If the virtual machine is fragmented, VMWare will notify you when launching the virtual machine. It’s not a bad idea to defragment the virtual machine every once in a while. The CD-Rom setting will default to Auto-Detect. This will allow your virtual machine to use a CD-Rom placed in the PC’s physical CD-Rom drive. The Ethernet setting… this is where things get interesting. During VMWare installation, a new network protocol “VMWare Bridge Protocol” is added to Windows and bound to the TCP/IP stack of every network connection. The bridge protocol will act like a OSI-Rm layer 2 bridge (switch) to allow multiple Operating Systems running on the same machine to communicate with each other on the same layer 3 IP subnet. The bridge protocol requires a network card on the host PC to have a network link. If there is not a link on a NIC, the virtual machine will not start the NIC. I set up my virtual machines to use bridge networking whenever I’m connected to a network (hard wired or wireless). Set up the virtual machines to use DHCP and the DHCP broadcast will be forwarded to the network in which you’re connected. The MAC Address of your machine will be bound to multiple IP Addresses from the perspective of the DHCP server if DHCP is used for both your host OS and virtual machines. On any platform using the same Linux application model as CUCM, DHCP can be configured via the command line interface (CLI) or the GUI-based platform administration. The latest versions of Cisco Emergency Responder (CER) and Cisco Unity Connection use the same Linux OS and IBM Informix database server (IDS) as CUCM. The command from the CLI is “set network dhcp eth0 enable” while the GUI based platform administration menu is Settings > IP > Ethernet. Static IP Addresses can be used on your virtual machines, but these IP Addresses will need to be on the same subnet as the host OS if bridge networking is to be used. The installation of VMWare will also add two virtual network interface cards (NICs) to your Windows machine. These virtual NICs can be leveraged if/when your PC is not attached to a network. I teach classes for Global Knowledge in NYC a lot. My daily commute involves spending nearly three hours on the train while commuting. I use most of this time to study and test. Bridge networking would not allow me to connect to CUCM because I did not have connectivity to a network. When commuting, I would hard code an IP Address on CUCM and one of my two VMWare network connections. I played with VMWare’s NAT and Host-only Ethernet options, but I never took the time to fully understand them. The Custom Ethernet allows you to choose one of the VMWare network connections that were installed with the VMWare software. The VMWare network connection you choose should be configured in the same subnet as the CUCM virtual machine with a different host address. I frequently used 192.168.1.254 for VMWare and 192.168.1.253 for CUCM when writing the CIPT1 Cisco Press book. The conversation will continue in the next blog with the USB controller VMWare setting.