Release Note

Cisco Unified ICM/Contact Center Enterprise & Hosted Editions, Release 7.5,

Hardware and System Software Specification

4 Software Upgrade and Installation Considerations

Upgrading a Unified ICM/Contact Center installation from Release 5.0 or 6.0 requires that you first upgrade the entire

system to 7.0(0) SR4. You can then install the 7.5(1) release (and subsequent maintenance releases) on your (upgraded)

7.0(0) SR4 system.

This section describes the considerations for the upgrade process.

4.1 Upgrading to Unified ICM/Unified Contact Center Release 7.5(1)

Upgrading to Unified ICM/Contact Center Release 7.5(1) is explained in the Upgrade Guide for Cisco Unified

ICM/Contact Center Enterprise & Hosted Editions. For Cisco Unified System Contact Center Enterprise, please refer to

the Upgrade Guide for Cisco Unified System Contact Center Enterprise for detailed guidance on upgrading that product.

This section highlights some of the considerations to be aware of.

There are two distinct approaches for upgrading an existing Unified ICM/Contact Center installation to the 7.5(1) release

of the software:

 Technology Refresh: Installing and configuring the system and product software on newly acquired hardware,

migrating historical and configuration data from the prior hardware environment.

 Common Ground: Upgrading software in-place on pre-existing hardware, migrating data in place.

In both of the above cases, the Unified ICM/Contact Center database is migrated using a migration utility (introduced in

7.0(0)) known as the Enhanced Database Migration Tool (EDMT). EDMT streamlines the upgrade process by migrating

data and schema efficiently in bulk (usually over the course of a single maintenance window) and with an improved user

interface. This replaces the prolonged “shadow copy” process of prior upgrades. Both EDMT and detailed procedures for

the overall upgrade and migration can be found in the Upgrade Guide for Cisco Unified ICM/Contact Center Enterprise &

Hosted Editions.

Deciding on the appropriate upgrade path depends in part on whether a customer’s existing hardware is suitable for the

7.5(1) deployment. Cisco recognizes the importance of protecting a customer’s investment in recent generation hardware,

and for that reason ongoing qualification of the Unified ICM/Contact Center product is extended to address older

hardware. At the same time, given significant strides in processor speeds (and multiple cores) as well as increasing

computational demand from both the system and application software, a level of relative concurrency in supported

hardware is maintained. As a guideline, Cisco minimally certifies and supports the current release hardware that met the

corresponding product Hardware and System Software Specification (Bill of Materials) when purchased new two major

releases back. Capacity and sizing numbers differ between those for “minimum recommended” and currently available

hardware models – and capacity profiles presented in Section 5.1.2,

Unified ICM/Unified Contact Center Operating

Conditions, reflect that difference between capacities shown for new deployments (and technology refresh) versus

common ground upgrades. The current generation (new deployments) hardware specified is strongly encouraged for all

upgrades, to fully exploit the call processing capacity designed into the Unified ICM/Contact Center products.

Unified ICM/Contact Center Release 7.x is optimized for the Windows Server 2003 operating system (both Standard and

Enterprise Edition), and all new installs must be performed on that operating system. Ongoing support for Release 7.0(0)

(Unified ICM and Unified CC) running on Windows 2000 Server effectively ended in October 2006 (one year following

the General Availability date of the Windows Server 2003-compatible 7.0 product)

Recognizing the significant impact of an operating system deployment in the upgrade scenario, Cisco will support

transitional 7.0(0) SR4 or 7.1(x) deployments on Windows 2000 Server, provided customers subsequently migrate to

Windows Server 2003 within 30 days of the upgrade to 7.0(0) SR4 or 7.1(x). This policy will NOT continue with any

Windows 2000 mainstream support from Microsoft ended on June 30, 2005. Microsoft offers Extended Support for five (5) years

after the end of mainstream support, or for two (2) years after the second successor product (N+2) is released—whichever is longer.

Refer to the Windows Product Family Lifecycle at http://www.microsoft.com/lifecycle for the latest information.