Review the Planning chapter. Make sure to review the following:

• Decide on your installation method.

• Decide on your cluster topology.

• For IM and Presence Service, decide whether you are installing a standard deployment or an IM and Presence Service central cluster.

• Review the Requirements and Limitations.

Review the installation requirements and record the configurations settings for each server that you plan to install.

• Get base OVA.

• Run the Collab Sizing Tool to get the required virtual machine count and specs of each virtual machine. If you don't want to run the Collab Sizing Tool, follow the guidance in the OVA readme and the OVA wizard to select a predefined starting point, which can be changed later if needed.

• If you are installing from a skip-install OVA from the factory preload of a Business Edition appliance, see Installation Guide for Cisco Business Edition 6000 and 7000.

Place the installation ISO file in a location where the virtual machine can access it and edit the virtual machine's DVD drive to map to the file. Select the option to mount the DVD drive when you power on the virtual machine.

When you power on the virtual machine, it mounts the ISO file and start the installation process. Do not begin the installation process until you have completed all the steps in this procedure.

For more information on the 80-ms RTT requirement, see the Cisco Unified Communications Solutions Reference Network Design.

If the publisher node fails to synchronize with an NTP server, subscriber node installation can fail. On the Unified Communications Manager publisher node, run the utils ntp status CLI command.

Temporarily allowing network traffic in and out of the nodes (for example, setting the firewall rule for these nodes to IP any/any) does not always suffice. The firewall might still close necessary network sessions between nodes due to timeouts.

Ensure that the network interface card (NIC) speed and duplex settings on the switch port are the same as those that you plan to set on the new server.

For GigE (1000/FULL), you should set NIC and switch port settings to Auto/Auto; do not set hard values.

With PortFast enabled, the switch immediately brings a port from the blocking state into the forwarding state by eliminating the forwarding delay [the amount of time that a port waits before changing from its Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) learning and listening states to the forwarding state].

For details, see Verify DNS Registration.

Make sure that your system has adequate licensing.

Review the Planning chapter. Make sure to review the following:

• Decide on your installation method and cluster topology.

• For IM and Presence Service, decide whether you are installing a standard deployment or an IM and Presence Service central cluster.

• Review the Requirements and Limitations.

Make sure that the Unified Communications Manager and IM and Presence Service software versions are compatible.

Gather all the information you need to complete the installation and configuration of the IM and Presence Service.

For every node in your cluster, create virtual machines using the Virtual Server Template (OVA file) that is recommended for your release.

Different OVA files are available; choose the correct OVA file based on the environment in which you are deploying Unified Communications Manager. For more information, see https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-cisco-unified-communications-manager.html.

Make sure that each IM and Presence Service server has network access to the Unified Communications Manager publisher server. Ping the Unified Communications Manager publisher node from the other IM and Presence Service servers.

Make sure that the Cisco AXL Web Service is enabled.

If you use DNS, ensure that you have configured the hostname of the new IM and Presence Service server on the DNS server and that the DNS server can resolve the hostname of the Unified Communications Manager publisher server and of other IM and Presence Service servers (if any).