Configuring Service and Enterprise Parameters

Check System Information

How can we obtain information about the underlying Communications Manager platform? Well as I mentioned earlier, I use the Administration screen as my starting point for most things. But we can go from here under the Navigation pane and select Cisco Unified OS Administration. And we click on Go. You are required to Login, with the Platform Administrator Account. And what we can do once we’re here in the Operating System Administration screen is go under the Show menu and we can select Network as an example. And the output is going to show us information such as what is the IP address of this server, what’s the subnet mask. We can see if we learned that IP address via DHCP or not. What’s the current status, it looks like we’re up. We can see if we’re configured for domain, we’re not in this case. And we can see what out default gateway is.

Cisco Unified OS Administration

We can go under the Settings > Version menu to get version information about Communications Manager. And we will see that we are running some 9.x or 10 version for example. We can see who our NTP Server is by going under Settings > NTP Servers, and we see that our NTP Server at 192.168.100.10 is currently accessible; that’s good news. We could check connectivity with different devices on the network. We could go under Services and say Ping.

What we’ve done in this demonstration is illustrated how we can go into the Cisco Unified OS Administration screen and glean some information about the underlying system platform, and test for connectivity to other devices on the network.

Modifying Service Parameters

In Communications Manager we’ve got a couple of different categories of Parameters that we can set. There are Service Parameters that might apply to a specific service on a server. And we’ve got Enterprise Parameters that globally apply to the entire cluster. Now, some Service Parameters are also applied to the cluster, but in general we think of a Service Parameter as being applied to a service running on a server. Let’s see if we can go into the Service Parameters Configuration screen. First of all we have to switch back to Cisco Unified CM Administration from the Navigation menu. Then we select System > Service Parameters. Select the Publisher. And then we select a service on that server: I’ll select the CallManager service. And as an example of a service that we might configure, let’s look for the CDR Enable Flag. The fasters way is to do a Ctrl+F to bring up a Find dialog box and search for CDR. And we’re able to find it pretty quickly: CDR Enabled Flag. Let’s set that to a True.

Service Parameters (CallManager)

Now what is this going to do for us? Well the CDR and the CMR Service Parameters, by setting this and another Service Parameter we’re going to enable the Communications Manager to collect caller information for billing and reporting purposes. Here, let’s set the CDR Enabled Flag to a True. Let’s Save that, and let’s next look for the Call Diagnostics Enabled Parameter. Again I’ll do a Ctrl+F to bring up the Find and I’ll search for Call Diagnostics. Here we go: Call Diagnostics Enabled Parameter. I’m going to set that to Enabled Only When CDR Enabled Flag is True. Well we just set the CDR Enabled Flag to True, so this will make the Call Diagnostics enabled as well and let’s Save that. Again, a couple of Service Parameters we might want to set up if we need the Communications Manager to collect billing and reporting information. And you can scroll through the listing of available options on your gear to see the plethora of Service Parameters that are out there: many, many different options for tweaking the Communications Manager server.

Activities

In the following activities, you will configure Cisco Unified Communications Manager basic settings given an existing Cisco Unified Communications Manager installation and network. We already explained that dealing with IP addresses instead of hostnames is more reliable approach as we are not dependent from the DNS service.

After that we will change our Time Zone settings as this is one of the most important things in order to have accurate logging in example. If you have a logs with wrong timing you have nothing. You cannot use them for troubleshooting, you cannot use them against the bad guys. It is one of the general security basics if you want.

In the end we are going to change few enterprise parameters as it was explained above. So, let’s start.

Task 1: Change hostname of Cisco Unified Communications Manager to IP Address

In this task you will change the hostname of Cisco Unified Communications Manager Server into its IP address. This change is related to the inter-cluster communication with the other nodes if any.

Activity Procedure

Complete these steps:

  1. Open the web browser window and type in this URL on the address bar, http://10.1.1.10/ccmadmin.
  2. Click Yes to accept the SSL Security Certificate.
  3. Use your credentials to Log in.
  4. From the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Administration page menu, select System > Server.
  5. From the Find and list Servers page, click find button, to display all server in the cluster (leave server field empty).
  6. Select the server by clicking the server name, and the Server configuration page will be displayed.
  7. On the Server configuration page, on the hostname/ip-address field, change the name to the IP address that you are using for your CUCM, and click save. Click Ok when the warning screen appears.

Activity Verification

You have completed this task when you attain these results:

Cisco Unified Communications Manager server is shown with its IP Address under the Server Menu in Cisco Unified Communications Manager Administration Page.

CUCM Find and List Servers

Task 2: Configure Time Zone

Configure correct time zone for your location. (Remember to use the navigation pane to return to the “Cisco Unified Communications Administration” page)

Activity Procedure

Complete these steps:

  1. From Communications Manager Administration page, go to System > Phone NTP Reference.
  2. Click Add New button to add a new NTP Reference.
  3. In the IP address field, type in the addres from some NTP Server. You can use some of your voice gateways for that purpose and we are going to use 10.1.1.101.
  4. In the Description field, type in “NTP Server”.
  5. Select as mode “Directed Broadcast”.
  6. Click Save.
  7. From the menu, select System > Date/Time group.
  8. Click Find button the list all the Date/Time group that has been configured on the cluster.
  9. If this is a new installation, there will be only one entry, CMLocal. Click CMLocal.
  10. From the Date/Time configuration page, change the time zone to your local time zone.
  11. Change the Separator to your preference.
  12. Change the Date Format as you like it.
  13. Click Add Phone NTP References button.
  14. From the Phone and list phone NTP Reference window, click Find, then select the IP address of your NTP, and click Add Selected.
  15. Click Save.

Activity Verification

You have completed this task when you attain these results:

CMLocal is set to your local time and the NTP Server is set to the NTP Server in the Lab Environment.

Task 3: Configure Enterprise Parameters

Configure enterprise parameters.

Activity Procedure

Complete these steps:

  1. On the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Administration page, from the menu select System > Enterprise Parameters.
  2. Verify that all URLs on the Enterprise Parameters page are using IP address instead of hostname. If there is URL that still use hostname, change it to IP address.
  3. Click Save to save any changes made on this page.

CUCM Enterprise Parameters Configuration

Activity Verification

You have completed this task when you attain these results:

Phone Parameters URL use the IP Address of Cisco Communications Manager.

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