Any installs of 90V or 50V?

[rcscott44]

Has anyone deployed one of the new -V switches yet? We have several customers looking to add them to their system and we are hoping to get some feedback before committing to the installs.

Our experiences with the newer 220T1 boxes have not been as good as we have come to expect from ShoreTel and hope to avoid more of the same.

[aclark414]

I am interested in hearing feedback as well. What problems have you seen with the 220T1?

[droerick]

Beware of upgrade issues

We have (soon to be had) a 50V installed at a remote site, and the introduction of the V Series was to help keep VM and AA from sucking up WAN bandwidth to low bandwidth sites correct? Well, the upgrade procedure pushes much more data now that the V series are linux based, and if the switch doesn't get it fast enough (did I mention low bandwidth) it gets caught in an endless TFTP loop. This customer is now facing day #3 without phone service as we are now expressing a NON V switch to them as supports solution was to create a local FTP server at the remote location, console into the V series switch and change the ftp server download to the new local ftp server, and not director. I am not sure what the rest of you think of this, but I was less than pleased. The director server is in North Dakota, with a point to point T1 to the branch in Arizona with QOS in place. We had to do an upgrade because of the hung analog trunk issue that the 50V was experiencing.

I am not letting any of my account managers sell V series switches until something can be done, cause as they sit today you cannot successfully do an upgrade in my opinion.

We also never got the AA to work on the V series switch before the upgrade mayhem began either.

I also wanted to share this other posting that I found. This doesn't appear to be a new issue, check the last post on page 1.

http://www.shoretelforums.com/forums/shoretel-enhancement-requests/2122-shoretels-own-dvm-rackmount-server-w-firmware-based-os.html

Dan

[droerick]

Upgrade of 50V

Feel free to message me if you want more in want more details revolving around our experience.

[luckycharms]

The V switches are very tricky. They can take anywhere from 5-30 minutes to boot and upgrading the switches firmware can take the same amount of time. We have been alpha/beta testing a 90v switch (6 months now) and it seems to be running most stable on our current build (13.23.6966.0) which was just released last month.

We had to replace the compact flash card with another "production quality" card provided by ShoreTel as they were seeing issues with the original cards.

We are not running the switch at a remote site, it is located at headquarters and currently manages my phone and several others (vmail and all). To my knowledge the 50v and 90v switches are still in beta. Waiting until 8.1 GA is the best bet.

[drkfiber]

I am seeing the same thing droerick is seeing. It has happened to two of our sites so far. We have had to RMA both switches.

[cburgy]

We've been running a 50V (additional at HQ) and a 90V (at a remote office) for about 8 or 9 months now. They are in fact based on Linux (instead of VXWorks) and the production units have different CF cards than the original beta units had.

That being said, they have been pretty stable for us. The upgrades do take markedly longer (as well as boot time) given the change in OS. We did experience upgrade problems with the remote switch (over a T1) but it has gotten markedly better with more recent builds. Shoretel actually released an application note to discuss the requirements.

Where they are a great fit is localizing voicemail and AA for small sites that need the functionality but don't justify a full DVS. Likewise, in large multisite implementations, you can run into the DVS limit (20 per system). It's largely based on architecting the system properly based on user requirements and which tools best fit those requirements.

Realistically, at this point of the V switch stage, you'll see them sparsely used in most installs. The V switch was primarily driven by the multi-location retail store type customer. Shoretel needed local auto-attendants (hours) and voicemail but it was too costly and more difficult to manage upgrades if done with DVS (not to mention the system limit).