Problem moving from MXe Server to ISS

[Ronan]

:hello:

We have 4 MXe Servers that are old, unreliable and impossible to maintain. We have bought 4 Dell servers. We know the hardware is OK since we have 3 of the same ones with ISS, those were new MCDs that we added to our cluster.

The trick is that we want to backup the MXe Servers and restore on the Dell ISS. We have the necessary licenses, however after the restore, it doesn't work.

Have any of you done this ?

We're using MCD 6.0 SP3.

[wiseguy]

Yes, I've done this a few times. There is no difference between MXe server and ISS server. The only part that can go wrong is that the ISS is not licenced correctly or the dimensions are wrong. (you checked that the backup is correct)

[Ronan]

Thank you for your answer, that's why I thought. Now Mitel is saying to us that it's not possible.

Can you describe the process to do this ?

My colleague who has tried it will describe what he has done to me later in the day.

Regards

[bluewhite4]

When I did this, I had to delete all references to anything analog, digital, or really anything that wasn't IP or SIP based. Also, the DHCP scope. Did a backup, and then restored into the vMCD, which should be the same as restoring to an ISS.

In my case, the vMCD had to already be semi-setup, licensed, etc. when I restored the backup. Keep in mind that they say that the IP address of the two (old and new) systems needs to be the exact same for the restore to be successful. Additionally, the DNS names have to be the same as well.

[wiseguy]

So The migrate/change is not from MXe Server to ISS but from MXe to ISS. Indeed you need to remove all analoge and digital connections and remove or make less Voice Mail channels as vMCD and possibly ISS can't handle the amount that you got in your MXe.
As to the IP addresses of the machine that is no issue from i believe version 6 onwards. The only thing you need to change after the system is up is the ICP/Xnet IP address for to local system and on the other systems.
The answer that this is not possible is weard as they sell/sold an upgrade part from MXe to ISS

[Ronan]

No no it's an MXe Server, no analog or digital trunks.

We tried again with the same IP on the ISS and the MXe Server (and the ISS server isolated from the network) and the restore works, except for one small detail : only the 16 included licenses are taken into account, so only 16 phones are restored, out of 1700 !

The problem here is that our systems are in a DLM, so the licenses are shared.

I have the feeling this should be easy but it's proving very difficult.

[ralph]

I had a similar problem trying to go from an ISS server to a virtual server in a DLM environment.
As soon as I applied the virtual license in the AMC it put a "License Violation" message on all phones.
I had to remove the license.  Mitel tech support didn't help.  Apparently no one in the world has ever done an ISS to virtual conversion in a DLM environment.   That project still isn't done. 

Ralph

[Ronan]

Our client will want to virtualize in the next couple of years, the ISS are a stop gap because the MXe Servers are not maintainable anymore, we have burned our spare already, one is running on a single HDD and the RAID won't rebuild, etc.

I was realizing that when we plan to go ISS => virtual the problem might arise again, and you confirmed it unfortunately.

We have had one instance of all phones in our cluster (13000 across the planet) showing "license violation" when starting with the Application Group, the client wasn't too happy about that.

With my colleague we're thinking about another way to do it, give us your thoughts :

We configure the ISS as a new machine with minimal configuration to integrate it into our cluster, and thus our Application Group. We have about 2000 IP licenses available we can assign to it.

We then unplug the MXe Server, and restore to the ISS. Then we do a basic sync.

Finally we ask the AMC to remove the MXe Server ARID from our group, giving us back our free licenses, to rinse and repeat with the 3 other MXe Servers.

Thanks

[VinceWhirlwind]

You can use the HTML toolkit to create a banner, then apply that banner to the "Branding Application" on the handsets and then the "Licence Violation" message won't be visible to the customers.
 
You still have to fix the licence violation before the timer reaches the "shut it all down" stage.

[Ronan]

Good news, we managed to do it.

We configured our ISS as a new ICP in our cluster. That way we could assign 2000 IP licenses to it. We shut down the MXe Server, isolated the ISS from the network, changed the MSL network info to use the MXe Server IP addresses, and restored the MXe Server database on the ISS. The licenses stayed on and all the users & devices appeared correctly. We did a clear hardware of the MXe Server on the AMC. We then connected the ISS to the network, did a couple of AMC sync from the ISS and the DLM, as well as a Network Element sync, and all is well. The phones came back from resiliency, we didn't have to intervene physically on them (fortunately, as they're spread out across the country and planet). From the POV of the cluster members it's as if the MXe Server was shut down and came back a bit later, with a new ARID. MiCC also working, LCS, LBG, etc. The only thing we didn't think about was SMDR so we lost a day of calls, not a big problem.

We just have to remove the cluster element/network element corresponding to the ISS before the restore, we're not doing it right away as we'll use it again to migrate the 3 other MXe Servers. We've restored that "before the restore" backup on another ISS and synced it with the AMC and cluster without trouble, our next migration is ready to go.