4500 5.4

[bwilliams2]

Has anyone upgrade their 45xx to 5.4?

I have done a few stacks. You no longer use JDM to manage the switches. EDM is now embedded in the switches and you point your browser to the management IP. I am not sure I like it. I have yet to see a port on the Physical View display its PoE status properly. Please share your thoughts if you have upgraded.

Thanks

[Michael McNamara]

I only have a few ERS 4548 switches but haven't had the time to upgrade them yet. I hope to get to it sometime soon (it'll probably be in July).

I'm a little concerned about EDM and how it will impact our ability to work efficiently. While I personally used the CLI interface the majority of the time, having JDM GUI available was a big advantage over other vendor solutions IMO.

I would definitely like to hear your thoughts on EDM and anyone else for that matter.

Cheers!

[bylie]

Hi,

We also have some 4500 switches in the field which we would like to upgrade but we're still reluctant to do so for the moment because of the required automatic "upgrade" to EDM. There are a couple of things I'm concerned about:

- Will it still be possible to connect to an EDM switch via JDM and what would happen when you accidentially configured something via JDM? In other words can we shoot ourselves in the foot or did they take this into account?
- We're currently using ESM to manage all of our networkdevices (yay for having a uniform Nortel/Avaya network) but I guess from the moment you upgrade one switch to EDM (read: non ESM/JDM compatible anymore) you'd better start using the new COM (Configuration and Orchestration Manager) to avoid compatibility issues?
- What's the impact of the EDM on the performance of the device it's running on? I can imagine doing everything through a local webapp generates more overhead than just using SNMP. I don't really know if there is some separation, resourcewise, between the management stuff like EDM and the actual network stuff. I hope you can't give a switch a final blow when it's heavily taxed by opening it's EDM, that would not be good .

I still have a hard time figuring out why they're leaving JDM/ESM, it is/was a great no-nonsense tool for day-to-day adminwork although I'm still more fond of the CLI to do bulkconfigurations (no need to do 1000+ clicks to setup a switch). In a talk from a Nortel/Avaya representative the biggest reasons seemed to be:

- EDM will always be up-to-date and inline with the switchfirmware while JDM had to be upgraded once in a while to support new firmware and switchtypes. Not that hard actually as EDM is part of the firmware and thus the device . I've never had any real issues with this however as we always just upgraded to the latest JDM when it became available, it's not that JDM had new releases every week.
- COM has full multiusersupport while ESM did not, we never tried to use ESM in a multiuserenvironment however so I can't really comment on this one.

[DaveTheRave]

Where can one download EDM from?

[bylie]

Where can one download EDM from?

For all I know EDM only runs as a webapp on the device itself compared to JDM which was a clientapp installed on a desktop, so the best way to get it is to upgrade the switch with a new firmwareversion which has EDM enabled. Is a standalone, nondevice hosted, EDM possible/available thus not requiring COM?

COM is the equivalent of ESM offering a total management solution but it's also a webapp although it's supposed to be installed on a dedicated server/PC.

Is the communication between COM/EDM and the switches still SNMP based or are they moving towards XML, ...?