Cisco Call Manager Express (CME) – Basic Configuration

I know the readers are quite experienced and they would not be interested in this post as this will guide to build the basic configuration of Call Manager Express.
I assume that basic configuration are done like assigning of IP Address on the interface, bringing E1/T1 cards up. To start with a very minimum and must configuration to register an IP Phone, we require the below configuration.

telephony-service
 max-ephones 10
 max-dn 10
 ip source-address X.X.X.X port 2000
!
!
ephone-dn  1
 number 10000
!
!
ephone  1
 mac-address xxxx.xxxx.xxxx
 type (CIPC/79XX)
 button  1:1

The above provided configuration are enough to register a Cisco IP Communicator. Now if we want to configure a 79XX IP Phone, we need to configure loads and upload relevant files into TFTP Server.

We can setup the local TFTP server on the router and this is done to share the phone load files with the phones as they boot. For example: – If we add Cisco 7940/7960, below are the files loaded into the flash along with the loads.

tftp-server flash:/phone/7940-7960/P00308000400.bin alias P00308000400.bin
tftp-server flash:/phone/7940-7960/P00308000400.loads alias P00308000400.loads
tftp-server flash:/phone/7940-7960/P00308000400.sb2 alias P00308000400.sb2
tftp-server flash:/phone/7940-7960/P00308000400.sbn alias P00308000400.sbn

Now we need to add the load in Telephony-Service so that when the phone boots up, it will look for the mentioned load shown below.

R1(config-telephony)#  load 7960-7940 P00308000400
R1(config-telephony)#  create cnf files

To setup GUI access for the CME, we need to configure the below. To open the same you need to open web-browser and enter http://x.x.x.x/ccme.html    (X.X.X.X represents the IP Address of the CME)

R1(config)#ip http server
R1(config)#ip http path flash:gui

Now to login to the administrator account for the GUI account you need a username and a password. To create a username and a password, you need to follow the below.

R1(config)#telephony-service
R1(config-telephony)# web admin system name admin secret [your secret password]

The above configuration is enough to bring up your Cisco IP Communicator / Cisco IP Phone up and registered with your CME.

Note:- In the above shown examples, i have just configured one Cisco IP Communicator. Based on the requirement and Phone Model, necessary loads are supposed to be added along with the ephone-dn and ephone configuration accordingly. Hope this clarifies.

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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