Well, yeah. That's what that means!
Now, I'm just talking out loud here, but if I were called in to bring up a voicemail that was on its arse, I'd make sure it was working before I left, yknow what I mean?
Now, you say Avaya Aura 6.01-8.0. Do you mean release 6 or 8?
On R6, CMM was included with the CM image, so it was the same server, same IP, and if you disp sig 99 and list node-names all, you'd see CM and CMM have the same IP and the sip sig group was between ports 5060 and 6060 with CM using 5060 and CMM 6060.
At R7+ CMM is its own virtual machine, so it has its own IP. You can tell that pretty easily displaying the sig group and checking the IP of the far end node.
If you're saying you needed just a CMM restored for a bad disk, I'm almost inclined to think you're on R7+ otherwise you'd have had a CM server restored with that too and on R6, CMM was only available on CM simplex (1 server, not the 2 HA server pair), so if you had a server die on R6 with CMM, I'd reckon you'd have been without a CM too.
So, if it is on it's own separate server, it would need to be pointed to WebLM. You're probably using System Manager for that, but in the CM webpage in the menu at the top you can click Licensing and see where CM is pointed. It's pretty reasonable to assume CMM is pointed to the same place. Access WebLM and see if any CMM licenses are occupied. If not, then maybe buddy restored your backup and missed pointing it to the license server, so that could be a fairly good reason why CMM wouldn't answer.
I'm guessing with you being Navy, you might have a dedicated CMM server on R6 which is possible for a special Federal Markets offer and I believe it could also do H323 signaling where that was deprecated for the most part at R6.0 or 6.2.
Otherwise, did buddy fixing your system back up run through the Military Unique Deployment Guide? Cause there's special stuff in there around securing the system. On the surface it doesn't seem like a big deal cause a sig/trunk group in service means at least voicemail is answering with SIP or H323 responses, so you know someone's home as far as the software running is concerned.
So, what else can you tell us?
And, what's in your alarm log?
And, when you click Start Messaging, paste the tail end of what's at the bottom.
I've seen situations where it thinks it's "started" but the tail end there will show you something like LDAPFE is not responding... repeatedly and it's technically running but it's still broke.