Now, instead of buying the phones bundled with the licenses, you would buy the spare phones and buy a separate license. First and foremost, they needed a way to be sure the licenses were bought and enforced when the phones were purchased. But at least it’s not Windows, right? In doing so, Cisco also decided to make some changes to the licensing model. Okay, so it’s a highly customized verison of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a totally different shell. When Cisco moved CallManager to version 5.x, they moved the OS to an “appliance OS”. And, I’m guessing a lot of people started doing this. Other than your conscience, there was nothing stopping you from saving $100 per phone and using the spare parts with no licenses.
How? Because CallManager 3.x and 4.x had no mechanism for license enforcement. If a person was so inclined, they could order a whole bunch of spare phones and use them with CallManager. Consequently, it was also about $100 cheaper. What made it spare? It didn’t ship with a license. The equals sign meant it was a “spare” part. Should your phone ever break, you could always order a replacement part, CP-7960=. Should Cisco ever come around and ask for your phone license, you went to that folder and pulled out the certificate and showed it to the person that asked. You got a little Right To Use certificate in the box, which you promptly took out and put in a file folder somewhere. When you purchased this part number, you also purchased a license to use this phone with CallManager. The phones had part numbers like CP-7960-CH1. In those days, licenses were purchased when you purchased your phones.
They did harden it somewhat to keep it from getting easily hacked, but you still had Windows running under all your call processing tasks. When Cisco acquired it around version 3.0, they kept that OS choice intact. From the beginning, Selsius (The company that developed CallManager) developed the platform on Windows 2000 server. Not too long ago, Unified Communications Manager was known as CallManager. Today I hope to shed a little light on things. Over the years, the process of obtaining the correct licensing for Cisco’s line of Communication Manager appliances has ranged from tolerable to outlawed by the Geneva Convention. For those of you out there that spend your time installing collaboration applications, or phones as the rest of the world knows them, all I have to do is mention the word “licensing” and you immediately have a Pavlovian reaction and start shaking uncontrollably.