Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 Software Release v5.1.6.0

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Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600Avaya has released software v5.1.6.0 for the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600. This release has no new features but instead addresses a number of software bugs. Please refer to the release notes for all the details. There is one bug in particular that I’ve personally seen;

  • Broadcast and multicast traffic that should be flooded within a VLAN is no longer forwarded out the same MLT as it arrived if the ingress port is in the port range 41-48 on an 8648GTR or 8648GTRS card. (wi00867614)

I stumbled across this problem while reviewing the port utilization (MRTG) for a number of switch ports. The ifInOctets and IfOutOctets for the ports didn’t look right so after running a packet capture from the standby CPU/SF and reviewing the trace we could see Multicast frames that were being sourced from the closet being sent back out to the closet.

I’m still working through a high CPU utilization issue with Avaya on an ERS 8600 IST/SMLT cluster running 5.1.5.1 software although I’ll probably try to load 5.1.6.0 in our testlab and see how it runs. I’d love to hear comments back from anyone running 5.1.6.0 software.

Cheers!

Avaya looking to cash in with IPO

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Last week Avaya announced that it would seek to raise $1 billion in an IPO.

As Ben Levisohn recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal “The IPO game is notoriously dicey for retail investors”, but for the companies going public it can provide a windfall of cash to help drive R&D and additional product development. With the recent results of the LinkedIn offering I can see why Avaya might be enticed to jump into the market. However, the IPO game is getting crowded with Pandora going public today (surged to $26 share but dropped back to $18 a share later in the session) and Groupon, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga all looking to possibly go public sometime later this year.

Thursday’s filing disclosed Avaya has lost more than $3.6 billion since it was taken private in 2007 in an $8.3 billion buyout. The engineers of that deal, Silver Lake and TPG, own a 72 percent stake in Avaya, according to Thursday’s filing.

In the past year, Avaya has introduced more than 60 new products and services to boost its revenue. Through the six months ending March 31, Avaya’s revenue totaled $2.76 billion, a 16 percent increase from the same period last year. But its losses have widened to $615 million in the current year from $421 million the previous year.

I will say that I was surprised at the financials reported above in the Yahoo Finance news post. With Avaya selling stock publicly they’ll now need to file quarterly statements with the SEC something they haven’t had to-do as a privately held company. I’m curious if the red ink will drive away future or existing customers. What do you think?

Cheers!

Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 Software Release v5.5

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Ethernet Routing Swtich 4500Avaya has released software 5.5 for the Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 series switch.

  • 802.1AB customization
  • 802.1AB integration
  • 802.1X non-EAP Accounting
  • 802.1X non-EAP re-authentication
  • 802.1AB new default parameters
  • AUR enhancement
  • DHCP Snooping External Save
  • EAP Fail Open with multi-VLAN
  • Layer 3 Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol
  • RADIUS EAP or non-EAP requests from different servers
  • SLPP Guard
  • SNMP Trap enhancements
  • STP BPDU filtering ignore-self
  • Unified Authentication
  • VLACP enhancements
  • Enterprise Device Manager enhancements
  • Web server client browser requests

The known issues and resolved issues are mysteriously blank although there is a note there that indicates those sections will be updated on May 20, 2011.

Please refer to the release notes for all the specific details and tidbits.

It appears that Avaya is trying to address the performance issues with EDM that many of us have documented;

Enterprise Device Manager enhancements

In Release 5.5 Enterprise Device Manager (EDM) is enhanced with improved data retrieval and request handling for significantly faster GUI response. In the navigation tree the IP Routing folder is renamed IP and the paths in related procedures have been updated. The Switch Summary tab contents have been enhanced to include basic switch information and stack information. A toolbar has been added above the EDM navigation tree. The 5 buttons in the toolbar add the following functions:

  • Switch Summary — you can use the Switch Summary toolbar button to open or reopen the switch summary tab.
  • Refresh Status — in addition to the existing refresh methods you can use the Refresh Status toolbar button to refresh the device status.
  • Edit Selected — in addition to the existing edit methods, and depending on which object you select on the Device Physical View, you can use this toolbar button to open Edit > Chassis, Edit > Unit, or Edit > Ports tabs. If you do not select an object from the Device Physical View and you click the Edit Select toolbar button, the Edit > Chassis tab opens.
  • Graph Selected — depending on which object you select on the Device Physical View, you can use this toolbar button to open Graph > Chassis or Graph > Port tabs. If you do not make a selection on the Device Physical View, or if you select Unit, the Graph > Chassis tab opens.
  • Help Setup Guide — this button connects you to the help setup guide for embedded EDM and it replaces the link that appeared on the top right of work panes.

Cheers!

 

Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 Software Release v6.1.6 – WARNING

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776833_57033628In March 2011 Avaya released v6.1.6 software for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 series. Since that release there have been a number of posts on the discussion forums and one thread in particular where a number of members have discovered a particularly nasty bug in the 6.1.6 software release.

In summary if the switch will continually reboot with a data exception error after the upgrade to 6.1.6 if it was originally configured running 4.x or 5.x software. You can recover from the problem by performing a factory reset of the switch and re-configure it from factory defaults. If you have the ASCII backup I believe you can upload that configuration after factory resetting the switch as opposed to manually re-keying the entire configuration by hand.

If your switch was originally configured running 6.x software then you apparently won’t have any issue upgrading to 6.1.6 software.

I’m not sure how this missed the QA folks… but I’m sure it’s probably hitting the fan right now back at Avaya.

Thanks to telecom116 for bringing the original issue to our attention.

Cheers!

 

Avaya Switch Clustering using Split Multi-Link Trunking (SMLT) Technical Confiugration Guide

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Avaya has released an updated version of their technical configuration guide outlining how to deploy switch clustering using Split Multi-Link Trunking (SMLT) on the Virtual Services Platform 9000, Ethernet Routing Switch 8600, 8300 and 5000.

This is really great document that helps to outline the best practices when deploying an IST/SMLT configuration within your network.

Here’s the summary of the document updates for March 2011;

March 2011 – Added recommendation to use MLT advance mode on edge Ayava stackable switches when used with ERS 8000 square/full mesh topologies for IP based traffic. Changed VSP CP Limit configuration from port level to MLT level. VRRP hold-down timers can be set in the ERS 5000 6.2 release.

It’s well worth the read in my opinion.

Cheers!

 

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