Moving CUCM to Azure

I had an interesting call with a customer a little time ago, who had a requirement to have a CUCM in the Azure. I will not go into all the details as to why it had to be CUCM in Azure, but this was one of those rare occasions where I had to persuade a customer not to do the project.


I had many reasons against it as you probably know too, the biggest one being that it’s not a supported deployment by Cisco.

But the customer ended up convincing me to try to help them, and I started on the journey of installing a CUCM instance on Azure native Virtual Machine.


I present the following guide as a Proof of Concept, and highly recommend not doing this in production system. So here we go.

Lab preparation

My lab components:

• VMWare Fusion (I’m on MAC)

Firstly, in Azure you cannot just upload an ISO file and create VM and start the installation, as you would do on VMWare server. You need to have a running machine which you can migrate to Azure.

Secondly, we need to understand that you cannot have static IP Address configured on the server, you need to enable DHCP. That does not mean the server will not get a static IP, but it will be done rather on Azure NIC level configuration. We will see it later.


So I knew I had to enable DHCP, which means I had to setup DNS server with reverse lookups as well, so that CUCM would get correct IP and hostname.


I build Windows server in the VMWare with DHCP & DNS server that would give appropriate configuration to the CUCM. I will not go into detail how I set this up, as it’s out of scope for this guide.

Once this was done, I went through a standard CUCM installation on VMWare. I will not go through every step, but wanted to highlight again the importance of saying yes to DHCP below.