The Cisco ELM (Enterprise License Manager) and the rehost debacle

It is of no surprise by now that the same UCS box I have been fighting with over the last few weeks still has on-going issues.  Last night I finished an ELM rebuild.  For those of you that do not know what ELM, it is basically the PLM of CUCM 9.X.  So what is PLM then?  Well if you haven't any experience with CUCM 9-10 then that would be a good reason why you don't know.  Basically, Cisco went away from device licenses on CUCM 8 to an ELM/PLM user based license system.  There is still a licensing server and manager, it's just that the server is now either a dedicated VM or sits along side with CUCM or Unity.  The good thing about the ELM in standalone mode is that if your CUCM eats it or Unity craps the bed nothing is affected, just do a restore.  With ELM you upload the PAKs to the server or still go do it the old school way through Cisco and then put the information in the ELM/PLM. 

The major problem with ELM is that if it eats the dirt you have to rebuild it from scratch.  This isn't normally a problem until you run into a deployment where they didn't statically set the MAC on the VM.  Guess what is tied to the hash which includes the MAC on the VM?  You guessed it, the licensing.  I rebuilt the ELM and didn't bother to check to see if their existing ELM was statically set.  I was happy, everything stood back up the restore worked and I could see the keys.  I changed over the ELM control to the new one and BAM, right in the kisser, licensing conflicts. 

I could have just changed the MAC on the new VM to what the old dynamic one was set to but you can't if the old ELM is still turned off and sitting on the ESXi.  I never delete old VMs until I am absolutely sure I no longer need them and thank goodness I didn't.  I wrote down the info, shutdown the new ELM and fired the old one back up.  It works, just goes into read-only mode every 4 days...  So now, I need to get in contact with Cisco and see if they can re-host the license.  The second barrier is this unit doesn't have software SmartNet on the contract, so I might be out of luck.

It's funny how everything melts down with this particular site.  I'm not sure if it's just a run of hardcore bad luck or if the UCS boxes are cursed from Cisco saying upgrade me to 10.6 (10.5.2).  Either way, I'll be glad once this debacle is over.