Cisco Business Edition 6000 BE6K-M6-K9 – M6 Appliance, Export Restricted Software

Product Overview

Cisco BE6K-M6-K9 is the Cisco Business Edition 6000 M6 appliance in the export-restricted software version. It is not an endpoint - it is the 1RU on-premises server that the endpoints in a Cisco estate register to, hosting calling, messaging, contact centre, edge, management and meetings applications as virtual machines on one platform. Cisco caps the BE6000M at 1000 users, 1200 devices and 100 contact centre agents. Cisco announced end-of-life on 30 June 2025 with end-of-sale on 29 September 2025 and a last date of support of 30 September 2030, and states that customers may migrate to BE6K-M7-K9 or BE6K-M7-XU, or to other virtualized hardware.

Product Description

The K9 designation is the export-restricted software version; Cisco's ordering table pairs it with BE6K-M6-XU as the export-unrestricted alternative. Choose between them according to the destination country's encryption rules, because this is a software distinction rather than a hardware one and it cannot be changed by reconfiguring the appliance.

The M6 hardware is a single Xeon 4310T at 10 cores and 2.3 GHz with 64 GB of RAM, six 600 GB SAS drives in a single RAID 5 set behind a SuperCAP-backed controller, redundant 1050 W power supplies, two 10GE copper LAN-on-motherboard ports and a PCIe NIC providing four 10GE SFP+ ports, all in one rack unit. Note that SFP+ optics and DAC cables are not part of the appliance PID. Field-replaceable components carry their own part numbers: BE6K-CPU-M6, BE6K-DISK-M6, BE6K-PSU-M6 and BE6K-PSU-M6-1200, BE6K-RAIDCTRLR-M6, BE6K-RAM-M6-M5 and BE6K-TPM-M6.

Two licensing points decide the real cost of a deployment. Each appliance requires a VMware vSphere ESXi licence, which Cisco states must be customer-provided, and entitlement for the collaboration applications themselves is sold separately from the hardware. M6 appliances covered by the Release 15 installation guide arrive factory-preloaded with the 14X15X-K9-16 or 14X15X-XU-16 applications suite for Collaboration System Releases 14 and 15, and Cisco cautions against reinstalling the virtualization software on a preloaded appliance. Approved third-party collaboration applications may run co-resident per Cisco's virtualization documentation. See network hardware for rack and switching infrastructure, video conference systems for the endpoints that register to it, and Cisco for the wider range.

Key Features

• Single 1RU appliance for a full collaboration stack — One rack unit hosts calling, messaging, contact centre, management and meetings applications as virtual machines, removing the need to rack a separate server per application.
• Export-restricted software version — Cisco's M6 end-of-life bulletin describes BE6K-M6-K9 as the export-restricted software version, with BE6K-M6-XU as the unrestricted alternative for destinations where that applies.
• Ten-core Xeon with 64 GB RAM — A single Xeon 4310T at 10 cores and 2.3 GHz with 64 GB of RAM gives headroom for multiple co-resident application virtual machines on one host.
• RAID 5 across six 600 GB SAS drives — Six-disk RAID 5 behind a SuperCAP-backed controller means a single drive failure does not take the collaboration platform down, and the drive is field-replaceable as BE6K-DISK-M6.
• Redundant 1050 W power supplies — Dual supplies allow the appliance to be fed from two circuits or two PDUs so a single supply failure does not interrupt calling.
• Ten-gigabit networking as standard — Two 10GE copper LAN-on-motherboard ports plus a PCIe card with four 10GE SFP+ ports give enough interfaces to separate management, application and backup traffic.
• Factory-preloaded application suite — M6 appliances covered by the Release 15 installation guide ship preloaded with the Collaboration System Release 14 and 15 applications suite, so the unit arrives ready to configure.
• TPM security module — A dedicated trusted platform module, BE6K-TPM-M6, is a listed component supporting platform integrity requirements.
• Defined migration path — Cisco names BE6K-M7-K9 and BE6K-M7-XU as the migration products, so an M6 purchase has a documented forward path rather than a dead end.

Typical Applications

• Commercial meeting space — The appliance is the on-premises call control behind an estate of meeting rooms and desk endpoints of up to 1200 devices.
• Government space — Agencies that must keep call control and messaging on their own hardware rather than in a cloud service deploy an on-premises appliance.
• Multi-purpose room — Rooms registering to on-premises Cisco Unified CM depend on this platform for dial plan, voicemail and management.

Technical Specifications