BACKGROUND
Being a Cisco Unified Communications (aka Collaboration) engineer, I have a SOHO lab where I stage various Cisco application servers and practice scenarios that I deploy for my clients. I started delving into virtualization back in 2009 – several years before Cisco decided to virtualize Unified Communications applications. Back then, Cisco Unified Communications applications ran directly on bare metal, but with a few tweaks, it was possible to install them as virtual machines for lab purposes. Initially, I used VMware Server and VMware Workstation as my hypervisors and ran the VMs on my laptop, but in 2010 I bought my first lab server to be used as an ESXi host. Continue reading
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