CMS relicense

[FoneFun]

I have a CMS v11 running on an old Ultra 5 platform. It's somewhat old and I am concerned that the drive might fail.
So I tried purchasing a spare server and re-install the CMS on another machine as a backup. We got pretty far but are now stuck at the AUTH_SET step where we need to authorize the licenses.

I've contacted our Avaya business partner who tells me that Avaya is the only one who can set the licenses and as V11 is considered End of life and End of Support, they won't re-authorize and my only option is to upgrade the CMS.

Does this sound right? I can't beleive that Avaya will not allow me to continue to use software that I've purchased if the original hardware fails.

Short of upgrading to a new CMS (and I'm sure they will next tell me I need to upgrade PBX too), does any one see any other solution?

 

[nohuhu]

FoneFun,

Your Avaya Business partner is right, CMS R11 is long out of sales and they can't do anything about it. In fact, only Avaya can authorize new CMS installations and they won't do that because R11 is EoL.

In case your original hardware fails, you can have a spare HDD. Ultra 5 uses ordinary IDE HDDs, they're cheap and abundant. If you do your backups in a regular fashion you can restore CMS to a new HDD in no time. Another option is to buy a whole spare machine; it doesn't have to be Ultra 5, any low end Sun workstation will do. If you're not comfortable with DIY approach you can buy a used CMS system from a second hand hardware dealer and have it as a spare in case your main system fails.

Speaking of DIY approach, it's actually not a big deal. You can set up CMS software on practically any Sun hardware that is still available, it's not picky at all. It hasn't changed a lot since R5, and that was right before the Big Bang.

Regards,
Alex.

Regards, Alex.
My Avaya blog:

http://avaya.dwalin.ru

 

[FoneFun]

Was able to clone the current hard drive, drop it into an identical set of spare hardware from Ebay and confirmed that it works.

One thing less to keep me awake at night.
At least we won't go dark if the production server fails.