CUCM 10.5 – Updating VMtools

Cisco Call Manager is an integral part of any company that runs it for all of their “voice” or telephony services. I’ll be honest… I’m always a little afraid to console in and do stuff on a CUCM server because I don’t feel like I know enough to quickly troubleshoot issues I might cause.

However that doesn’t mean that I can avoid CUCM all together. I do have to jump into a CUCM server occasionally. Like when it’s been virtualized and it’s time to update the version of VMware Tools (VMTools) that is running on it. Thankfully, that task is a lot easier than it might initially seem. I’ll demonstrate how to upgrade the VMTools on a server running CUCM v10.5.2.

In vCenter, select your CUCM server. Dropdown the ‘Actions’ menu and select ‘Guest OS’. Then click on “Install VMware Tools…”.

You’ll see a pop-up message, click ‘Mount’. This will make vCenter mount the VMTools iso in your virtual machine so that the guest OS can access the installer.

Now, login into your CUCM vm’s console as an admin, and enter the following commands.

admin: utils os secure permissive
admin: utils vmtools refresh

You will be prompted that the tools install will reboot the machine twice. Press ‘y’ and hit ‘Enter’ to continue….

If vmtools has not ever been installed on this vm, or if the install didn’t complete, you might see a message that stating that you need to manually restart the server. If so, enter the command it shows to finish the intsall by rebooting the server.

admin: utils system reboot

After the reboots are finished, log back in as admin to your CUCM server. Enter the following command.

admin: utils os secure enforce

That’s it! Your VMtools have been updated. The updated guest OS info should now be visible when you look at this CUCM vm in your vCenter.