Celebrating 10 Years as a Microsoft MVP!

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Back from my vacation, I am thrilled to share that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for the 10th consecutive year. In addition to being recognized as an expert within Teams, I am have also been recognized as an expert with Microsoft Copilot. This means a lot to me.  Being an MVP has been an incredibly rewarding journey, both personally and professionally. It has provided me with countless opportunities to grow, learn, and connect with like-minded professionals who share a passion for technology and innovation.  The award is not just a title; it's a testament to the hard work, dedication, and contributions to the tech community. It's a privilege to be part of such an esteemed group of individuals who share the same love for technology, and sharing their knowledge about it.  As I reflect on the past decade, I am thankful for the experiences and knowledge I've gained. This recognition motivates me to continue sharing my expertise, mentor

Installing CUCM 7 on Hyper-V

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*Updated at the bottom*

#WARNING#
Information here is for educational purposes, do not apply to any production environment! This blog post is a result of me wanting to run CUCM in an environment not supported by Cisco or Microsoft in any way, and is intended for LAB purposes only.

If you have read my earlier posts, you know I am trying to study to a CCIE Voice certification. I have been forced to slow down a bit by things at work and in my life, but the goal is still there.

As Cisco has moved to their v3 blueprint, one of the first things I have to do is to install CUCM 7 into a virtual environment. We already have a Hyper-v installation at work, and that's where I wanted to install the server. This proved harder than I though.

If you have tried the same thing, you'll probably end up with the error message:

'The hardware you are using is not supported for this product. Installation will now halt.'

I know CUCM is supported as a virtual machine, but it is obviously not supported by hyper-v. Since I do not have a license for vmware server, I found myself in a tight spot. But I found a way around my problem, and I do have CUCM 7 running on Hyper-V. Here is a short drill down of what I did:

- My first obstacle was not having a virtual server where I could create a machine, I only have the free player at my disposal. After a few attempts at Google, I found a site called easyvmx where i can create a blank VMware machine online (then download and mount it with player). With the empty machine (remember to allocate enough ram (2gig), disk space (120Gig) and to create it as a RED HAT ent. image) it was easy to start the player and boot from the CD-ROM (mounted ISO image of CUCM 7). The installation was straight forward, but my USB disk was to slow. I ended up installing the vmware image on my local HD instead of the USB drive. Don't know why, other VM's been ok on the USB.

- Next I had to convert the virtual HD from VMDK to VHD. I came across a tiny tool called Vmdk2Vhd from the vmtoolkit. Make sure you get v 1.0.13, as the version I found first was unable to read my VMDK.

- After converting and moving to hyper-v I was then stopped by an error message during "starting local" which prompted me: "Hardware not supported" and an option to shutdown the computer.

This is where I needed to get creative. I booted the Hyper-v image with an Ubuntu live CD and edited the file /usr/local/bin/base_scripts/hardware_check.sh by adding Exit0 as the first command in "function hardware_check_display_error_shutdown()".

I am uncertain if could have skipped the entire hardware_check.sh script, so I just ignored the error.

Thank you colleagues for helping me with the Linux stuff... You know who you are :)

**I'm sorry, there was a typO in this post. It is supposed to be "exit 0" not exit0.**