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!!
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