Overview
UCX supports virtualized software as an option, enabling deployment on a customer-supplied server running VMware vSphere 5+, Hyper-V or KVM operating softwares. Virtualized UCX software is packaged in OVA or Hyper-V or QCOW2 formats. UCX software can now run inside a virtual machine, on a dedicated server, an appliance, or a combination of these, giving you tremendous flexibility. The ability to virtualize UCX helps customers take full advantage of the benefits of virtualized infrastructure, such as server consolidation, increased security, operational flexibility, and higher applications availability during planned and unplanned downtime in order to achieve cost savings and business continuity objectives.
Image Defaults
The default settings for all Virtual Machine (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM) images are:
- CPU Execution Threads: 2 (The Minimum of 2 allows access to the system if the main thread stops executing)
- Memory: 1536 MBytes (1.5GB)
- HDD: 16GB (This size was chosen to keep the image to a reasonable size)
- IP Address Default Mode – DHCP Client (IP Address, Default Gateway, and DNS Server info assigned by DHCP server)
Deployment
The supported operating environment for deployment are:
Licensing
Your Virtualized UCX system requires a license to operate. See System – Licenses page for steps to obtain a license for your system.
Please note that if the MAC address of your virtual system is changed, then the license will become invalid. You will have to request a new license after a MAC address change.
Resource Requirements
Having sufficient resources to run your UCX Virtual Software is critical to ensuring a successful deployment and operation of your UCX Server.
There are four variable criteria that need to be considered to successfully deploy a UCX virtualized software:
- Amount of memory (RAM)
- Size of the persistent storage (SSD)
- CPU processing power
- IOPS (drive I/O operations per second)
The required criteria for these four variables can be computed based on four pieces of information as follows:
B – The maximum number of hours of voice storage per user
C – The maximum number of hours of call recording storage
D – The maximum number of concurrent calls
However, to simplify the process of determining the resource requirements for systems of various sizes, the following table shows the capacity specifications of the E-MetroTel hardware appliances and the resource sizing required to simulate that same environment.
| Appliance / Resource Requirement | Extensions | Concurrent Calls | Call Recording Hours | RAM (GB) | Virtual CPUs | Storage (GB) | Min IOPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galaxy Mini | 64 | 32 | 640 | 1 (Note 1) | 4 | 16 | 256 |
| Galaxy 250 | 100 | 100 | 2400 | 2 | 4 | 32 | 400 |
| Galaxy Expand (2930) | 200 | 100 | 2400 | 2 | 4 | 32 | 400 |
| Galaxy Expand (i5) | 1000 | 500 | 64000 | 8 | 8 | 500 | 2000 |
| Galaxy 3000G | 2400 | 1000 | 128000 | 16 | 8 | 1032 (RAID) | 2000 |
Network Requirements
The UCX Server must have the ability to communicate with E-MetroTel public servers using the HTTP protocol. HTTP requests are always initiated by the UCX Server – hence any firewall should be configured to allow the UCX Server to receive responses to such requests.
When you launch a new UCX virtual machine based on the image, the virtual machine uses DHCP to get its IP address, default gateway and DNS servers. (Note that this is different than the physical UCX Server configuration which uses 192.168.1.200 as the default IP address.)