Various types of Licensing in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)

Few days ago i came across this topic of Licensing(Prime License manager) in CUCM and i found  it itself is whole realm. 

Firstly what is licensing and why actually it is important and what are the various styles of it. Am going to cover all this in here.So, let’s get started:

In Version 9.0 cisco introduced a license manager to provide centralized license management for all the call manager clusters. Licensing for the Cisco Unified Communications Manager is determined by the total number of users, user features, and devices configured.  Prime License Manager then takes the count of all licenses required from all CUCM and then compares the total requirements to the number of available licenses which are installed.

Types of Unified Communications Manager licensing :

• Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing (UWL) : Basically these licenses are based on  a group of users. It includes soft clients, application server software and licensing on a per user basis. Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing is available in Professional Edition and Standard Edition.
• Cisco User Connect Licensing (UCL) : It is a user-based license and these licenses are based on per user .  UCL is available in Essential, Basic, Enhanced, or Enhanced Plus.

The license types available for UCL are as listed. Basically these are the different types of licenses available for CUCM:

• Essential :  supports one device providing basic voice or analog device (phone or fax). (For eg: analog phone, ATA 186, ATA 187, Cisco 3905, Cisco 6901) .
• Basic :  supports one device, including all Essential devices,plus basic (voice and video) call control features. (For eg: Cisco 6921).
• Enhanced : supports one device, including all basic devices,plus advanced (voice and video) call control features including desktop and mobile clients. (For eg: Cisco 3911, Cisco 3951, Cisco 6941, Cisco 6945, Cisco 6961,Cisco 79xx, Cisco 89xx, Cisco 99xx, Cisco E20, Cisco TelePresence EX60, Cisco TelePresence EX90).
• Enhanced plus : supports up to two devices, and including all Enhanced devices.
• CUWL Standard : supports advanced (voice and video) call control features including desktop and mobile with maximum up to 10 devices per user.
• CUWL Professional : includes CUWL Standard features and professional collaboration workspace application features with maximum of ten devices per user.
• Telepresence Room :  supports room based immersive and multipurpose Cisco TelePresence System endpoints. (For eg: Cisco TelePresence System Series 3200, 3000, 1300; Cisco TelePresence MX Series; Cisco TelePresence TX Series;Cisco TelePresence System Profile Series).

The Essential, Basic, and Enhanced UCL licenses support users with one device associated to them, where the user’s id is entered in the OwnerUserId field of one device. The Enhanced Plus UCL license supports users with two associated devices. UWL Standard and UWL Premium support users with three and up to ten associated devices.

Further,  TelePresence Room license covers both the TelePresence device and phone that is registered to Cisco Unified Communications Manager, only if the same userid is entered as the OwnerUserID field for the TelePresence device and the phone. If the same userid is not entered in the field  “OwnerUserID” then that means two licenses are required one for the device in telepresence  and the other one  for the phone. Also, touch of telepresence do not require any licenses as they aren’t registered with CUCM

I hope this would have been informative for you and I’d like to thank you for viewing.

Avinash Karnani

I am working in an IT company and having 10+ years of experience into Cisco IP Telephony and Contact Center. I have worked on products like CUCM, CUC, UCCX, CME/CUE, IM&P, Voice Gateways, VG224, Gatekeepers, Attendant Console, Expressway, Mediasense, Asterisk, Microsoft Teams, Zoom etc. I am not an expert but i keep exploring whenever and wherever i can and share whatever i know. You can visit my LinkedIn profile by clicking on the icon below.

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