Upgrading from Unity 4.0(5) to Unity 5... and adding failover..

keithtudge · ‎04-16-2009

Hi

Currently we're running a single Unity 4.0(5) box as a simple standalone voicemail box - by that I mean we don't use the full unified communications. What we want to do is achieve 2 things. Upgrade to Unity v5 and also introduce failover. We already have a 2nd Unity 4.0(5) box that is essentially doing nothing. When we introduced Unity, the original plan was to have redundancy but our supplier didn't exactly supply us with our requirements so for the last 18 months we've had 2 servers with only one essentially doing anything. The 2nd one is currently powered down.

What would be the best way to achieve our 2 goals?

We've currently been advised that the best route will be the following:

1. Take a COBRAS backup of the v4 server.

2. Build the secondary server to v5

3. With a temp 3rd server, build this to the primary unity v5

4. Restore COBRAS backup to primary unity v5 (the temp server)

5.Install and configure failover and test.

6. Once tested, power down primary Unity v5 (temp server) and migrate users on v4 to v5 server.

7. Power down the v4 server and rebuild as primary v5 server

8. Reconnect 'new' primary unity v5 server to secondary for failover

9. Decommision the temp server leaving our orginal two servers as a Unity 5 failover pair.

Now to me that seems a very clunky way to do things and the question I ask you fine people is..... is there a better way to tackle this and minimise the downtime to the user base?

Thanks in advance of any replies!!

Tommer Catlin · ‎04-16-2009

Honestly, COBRAS is not always the end all answer. DIRT will give you better results and less re-programming time. I'd take the 4.05 server and either do an inplace upgrade to 5.x (pull a drive first for quicker rollback).

Install your second server as Windows 2003, Unity 5.x and do a DIRT export of the old and DIRT import to the new server.

Bulk edit your VM profiles in CUCM to point to the new Unity server vm ports.

now you can rebuild your old server with Windows 2003 and make it your failover server.

Im assuming both servers are identical so there is no "better" server to use as primary.

I'd probably not mess around with COBRAs and temp servers to simply prove a point. Pulling a drive is much quicker for rollback. If your inplace upgrade goes sideways, you can simple pop in the other drive and you are back to 4.05, easy easy.

Whatever you do, do failover completely last, last thing.

Questions?

dominice · ‎05-21-2009

Hi,

Hope you don't mind me jumping on to thie conversation......

do you know if it is possible to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 without reinstalling the whole of unity?

as in I have just built a new server on new hardware, with the same level of windows and Unity. I presumed I could upgrade windows and then do DIRT? but the documentation looks to be saying that a fresh install of windows 2003 must be carried out........

Thanks

Jaime Valencia · ‎05-21-2009

There is really no upgrade properly speaking, it's a reinstall from scratch to update the OS.

Unfortunately you can't escape from this, you'll need to reinstall the server with W2K3 and then restore Unity

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate

HTH

java

if this helps, please rate