The AIM slot
The Cisco 2600, 3600, 3700 and 3800 Series routers provide enterprises and service providers a wide range of solutions for data, voice, and video.
These routers are equipped with an Advanced Integration Module (AIM) slot, which provides customers the flexibility to deploy additional features, see the following picture, this is a Cisco’s 3800 series motherboard, and the AIM slots (numbers 5, and 6) have been highlighted.
AIM-CUE is the smallest member of the family
AIM stands for “Advanced Integration Module” and that says nothing about the physical dimensions, aka product’s Form Factor nor about their technical specifications.
But anyways, knowing that this module will be connected directly in the router’s motherboard gives us a good clue about its dimensions, capabilities and limitations.
One particular AIM’s limitation is the fact that it cannot be installed in slot 0 of the Cisco 3745 router chassis, would be nice to know the reason why, fortunately this important limitation is well advertized in the AIM module with a huge yellow sticker.
NME-CUE the big brother
Cisco Unity Express (CUE) is supported on both modules, the AIM and the NME, its features work the same way on both modules with just a few exceptions that comes mainly from the fact that AIM use as its storage device a CF (Compact Flash) card, usually of 1Gb, and on the other hand NME comes with a regular 2.5″ HDD with sizes in the order of the hundreds of Gb.
The hard disk on the NME cannot be replaced. If the network module’s hard disk crashes, the network module must be replaced.
If you are interested on knowing more about these exceptions you can take a look at the following tech doc:
Available at: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/unity_exp/rel2_1/ccm_gui/cmeguigd/ch1over.pdf
Where to go from here?
From here you can now go to the following page: