Anyone self-upgrading major releases?

[lopes1211]

Just curious what the experiences have been. I know prior to the upgrade you've got some PLDS work to bring the licenses up to current then after the upgrade you have some GRT work to update the records. I guess my question is mostly what happens if/when you get stuck upgrading a product and then need to call for support? I see when opening a ticket online it asks if your ticket is related to an upgrade and then another question asking something along the lines of 'are you paying avaya to do the upgrade'. That line of questioning leads me to believe they might be less than enthusiastic about helping you. Currently we're using Avaya direct for everything and are not engaged with a BP.

-CL

 

[jimbojimbo]

I would strongly suggest against self upgrading. Especially with Aura 10, unless you are going to spend several months in the lab working through the whole process. There are just to many "gotcha's" to make self upgrade viable. Keep in mind, Aura 10 changed the versions of VMware, the operating system (Red Hat 7 to Red Hat 8) and the applications.

I would suggest going with a top Tier Avaya Business Partner. Even if they have to contract some of the professional services work back to Avaya, they are going to be in a much better position to drive the project.

Just to be totally up front, yes I work for a business partner.

Do not let the project close out until you have a successful healthcheck report for each applicable device.

 

[Arlo555]

We upgraded from 7.x to 8.x on our own with the exception of AES and some other applications that require APS. (e.g CMS, CRM connector) We have had our business partner handle most of the licensing and registration. Currently, we are upgrading the entire environment to 10.x. As Jimbojimbo stated there are lots of gotchas. Our entire Avaya environment is hosted on multiple Nutanix Clusters running ESXi which the telecom team already manages so we already upgraded to ESXi 6.7 and will upgrade to 7.x once we finish with the Avaya upgrades. You will need to dig into the documentation and be prepared for Avaya documentation to have mistakes, read the release notes closely. If you're unsure of the upgrade steps open a ticket with Avaya and tell them what you plan on doing they will help. It took me 3 tries before I was successful with our GR System Manager. Regarding Avaya supporting customer self upgrades that depends more on the engineer you get and when you are upgrading. On weekday nights I've gotten excellent support but on weekends not so good. They really don't want to support upgrades without trying to bill you on a weekend.I've found that SMGR, ASM, SBCE Avaya's bench is deep. I'll let you know in a few months how the remainder of our upgrades to 10.x have gone.

 

[phoneguy55]

We do our own upgrades. Get a lab and the docs and learn the process, then apply what you learned in production.

 

[lopes1211]

We have a lab and recently upgraded our prod AES and CMS. We're pretty comfortable with procedures and backout plans, I was really interested in Avaya's official policy as to if they'll help when stuck. We all have ACSS/ACIS, etc..., so we're not exactly trying to fly blind. We just don't know how much help Avaya will provide via our maintenance agreement.

-CL

 

[kyle555]

Also a partner. I've never expected much. They currently/used to have a program called RICS - remote implementation configuration services - for partners. We never used it and balked and paying for support for something that should work, but we'd also get turned away for anything related to upgrades.

If you're on your own VMware, you have a solid backout plan.

Based on what I've read from you, I don't doubt that you could pull it off. If you have the time and motivation (bonus?), get the quote and show off what you're worth.

What's your environment look like?

 

[lopes1211]

Yeah, everything is customer VMware with cm8.1 going cm10 as soon as it goes JITC probably 1st Q. Only adjuncts are IXM, CMS, AES and SBC. Contractually, we can only use Avaya direct for the time being and that hasn't worked out too well..... hence the AES and CMS self-upgrades. You can probably see where we're coming from here.

-CL

 

[kyle555]

if you pulled off AES and CMS, IXM is a pain and SBC isn't bad