We performed a Callmanager upgrade from 3.2 to 7 and Unity upgrade 4.0.3 to 7 (all on new hardware) this past week.
For the callmanager upgrade we didn’t do an actual “upgrade” with the DMA tool. Why you ask? Because A) it wasn’t a complicated system and B) it would be such a huge hassle to upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 to 4.1 then finally to 7 and C) 3.2 doesn’t have a BAT export, we simply built the 7 server from scratch and then did an SQL query on the old system and “massaged” that data into the BAT spreadsheet and simply imported the data into the new 7 server. It went off without a hitch. There was one gateway that I had to build in the new server and I essentially built the PTs, CSSs, RPs, RLs, RGs, etc., from scratch. I also had to copy MoH, call park ranges, and call pickup groups. It was a very smooth cutover. DHCP was on one of the old servers so I built a new DHCP scope on a layer 3 switch (with the option 150 pointing to the new servers) and shut the CM service off on the old publisher and subscriber. The phones reset and upgraded their firmware while I rebuilt MGCP on the gateway and everything worked.
For Unity (unified) we built the new system as a new 7 server and then upgraded the old server to 7 before performing a DiRT backup of the old system and then the restore onto the new system. We did have to request a temporary 7 license from Cisco but they obliged without any hassle. We wanted to use the COBRAS tool but it would not work on Unity 4.0.3. It went well except we had to battle limited hard drive space on the upgrade of the old server. There was 11mb of free space on drive C when I was done. I didn’t complete the entire upgrade process on the old box either. Once the actual Unity 7 install was done I ran the DiRT backup and performed the restore on the new server and it worked well. I didn’t finish the message store configuration wizard, etc., on the old box, but I didn’t need to.
-Go0se