HELP! Applications Loading / Upgrading message on random phones

[harts]

 Hi,

We have been experiencing an issue with our MITEL 3300 controllers and related 5320, 5330 and 5360 phones. A large number of telephones come up with a message saying:
"Please wait while upgrades are being performed on the HTML applications on this phone"
The phone either stays like this permanently or disappears and gives us about 30 seconds to login before reappearing. Once the user has logged in their phone shows "Applications Loading". The phone can make and receive calls once logged in but the keys and display do not show correctly.

This seems to happen on random phones...sometimes they will work after a reboot and sometimes they will not. We have a number of phones that do work so it is a complete mix.

All phones have base numbers and users have hot desk extensions. We have a primary controller and a secondary controller. Both have been rebooted, both have had their Databases restored. We have about 1300 telephones and relevant licences. Things have been working for a number of months with no issues.

We are now seeing an error on the controller reading: "SacUnpackPhoneInfo-> Max (Full) SAC Connection limit of 1000 reached. Device with MAC: 08:00:0F:56:10:CA rejected"

Mitel and our support provider have spent 3 days trying to resolve this but they cannot resolve it...any assistance greatly received!
Thanks
Stu

[harts]

UPDATE:

Mitel have said that 3300 controllers can only accept a maximum of 1000 devices of the 5300 model range....anything over this means they will not work. Anyone got any views on this?

If this is the case it is frustrating considering they sold us over 1000 devices!

[martyn]

Do you have all phones registered to the same controller?

[harts]

yes we do, as recommended by our support partner who setup the system

[martyn]

Without knowing a great amount of detail, it may pay to share the load across both controllers, assuming that both have public trunks. Given that the systems would be clustered and sharing all of the data it would spread the load a bit. Having the opposite controller listed as the fall back system, then the only time this problem would happen would be when one is offline, which you would assume is only for a short period of time.

Personally I haven't come across the 1000 limit, as there are generally multiple controllers spread across multiple sites, so the users register to their local site.

[Mattmayn]

I'm with Martyn, I would split the load between the two controllers.

[TKMan]

Splitting the load is good but 1000 53xx phones seems low especially since it was Mitel that recommended I upgrade my CPU and RAM to upgrade my capacity for my phone system when we hit the snag at 850. I am now just over 1000 and having problems, so the upgrade only got me 150 more phones, not worth it. Also Mitel did not tell you about this or I would have been looking at different options earlier.

Any way to expand this capacity by about 100 for the time being until someone can set up a plan to move phones from one system to another?

[VinceWhirlwind]

That's all very interesting, considering what Mitel tells us in relation to the number of devices the 3300 is supposed to be ale to support.
Assuming it's a hardware limit, they should probably come to the party for you with a plan to migrate all your phones to a virtual controller.

[BlackSunshine]

With 1000 devices you will probably need a seperate TFTP server for upgrades otherwise you will be there a while and with new 6900 series it’s even worse.