AVP versus customer VM

[lopes1211]

We are upgrading from 6.3 to 7.1 for a .gov customer which has no VMWare infrastructure. This will be a large upgrade with 20 locations, ESS pairs, AES, CMM, CMS, SMGR, SM, and 100 gateways. Red tape makes it "easier" to procure Avaya servers with AVP versus building out a VM environment that could be leveraged to replace another dozen existing voice app servers and gain flexibility, redundancy, LCO for future solutions/apps. Does anyone have any strong opinions to push the customer VMWare route versus AVP? i.e. - what do you lose/gain from each scenario? Or is AVP just a wide open version of esxi-5.5 which you could still setup NAS, clusters, vmotion, etc...? I'm not familiar with AVP so other than the limited choice of servers available from Avaya, I'm not sure if AVP hobbles the customer in any other ways. Thanks!!

-CL

 

[kyle555]

go avp. its not a full featured VMWare with the bells and whistles, and no hardware redundancy, but if they don't have vmware and unless you want to bundle selling them vmware and managing it, don't open that can of worms.

 

[lopes1211]

Well that's part of the rub. We do manage the other servers and apps (including AD, and other windows stuff on a dedicated voice LAN dedicated only for voice apps and their integrations) so we do see value in customer VM if VMWare functionality is in fact deprecated in AVP. It's not really a money or sales or profit issue, just more of a "what's the best solution for the customer" within reason without adding exceptional overhead/expense/complication. VMWare HA is one point that seems to stick out since they have had some issues with some simplex CMM, AES, and CMS failures which might have be mitigated somewhat with VMWare HA. It's about 10K users so lots of yelling when outages happen. 10K licenses will be a large cap-ex so skimping on hardware and core infrastructure doesn't make any sense if it brings value to the customer. If AVP versus customer VM differences are negligible, AVP would be easier for procurement.

-CL

 

[kyle555]

Well, the differences aren't negligible, but you'd have to price it out. More business for you if you sell and manage the vm farm too. AVP is based all on application level redundancy - so, duplex CM or ESS, AAM app servers with a MSS behind for offline message storage if the MSS dies, etc.
AES is a bit pricier for the app-level HA, but it can be done.

You'd have to price it out end to end to get a good idea - and then even decide if migrating to VMWare now from square one is a good idea. With newer virtualization technologies coming up, us PBX guys aren't exactly the most clued in on helping a large org devise a strategy to manage TCO on server farms.

Maybe AVP and don't think too hard and 1 hardware refresh cycle later they'll be using Avaya's VMs on Amazon's cloud and call you a jerk for selling them all this VMWare that's not worth maintaining vs what some cloud is doing. I have no idea!

 

[lopes1211]

Good point on better solutions being over the horizon. Maybe go AVP on overbuilt n+2 servers and let the VM gurus figure out elegant ways to backup or v-motion simplex apps before Amazon takes over the government anyway. Bezos in 2020!!!! .gov is probably 10 years behind that strategy though.

As far as more business/profits....we're already on-site daily so stability directly benefits us since the support labor is already a sunk cost. Broken stuff hurts us as a fixed cost support vendor versus broken servers being a revenue generator like it may be for other vendors. We want the solution to be bulletproof.

Perhaps blasphemy but I can't help but feel once we get a stable VM version no longer tied to future unsupported hardware, the days of upgrading the PBX every other year will disappear. :-(


-CL

 

[kyle555]

can't vmotion or n+1 on AVP. Its really just vanilla vmware for 1 host. You'd build your apps out across multiple. So, say 2 extra large fully loaded AVPs, put CM A and B on each, SMGR and GRSMGR on each, a separate AES for HA on each, and so on and so forth.

 

[jimbojimbo]

I would not sell AVP unless the customer is adamant about having Avaya Maintenance for Everything. It just is not as flexible as a real VMware environment. No vCenter licenses, No iLO4/iDrac (life saver), SDM overlay, No redundancy of the hosts, No central storage, No site recovery, etc, etc, etc.