Avaya Unified Communications Management applications

[brazenhead]

Can anyone provide an opinion on any or all of the Avaya Unified Communications Management applications? :

•   Configuration and Orchestration Manager
•   Visualization Performance and Fault Manager
•   Virtualization Provisioning Service
•   IP Flow Manager
•   Enterprise Policy Manager
•   Subscriber Manager

Our Avaya rep has preseted the applications to us a couple of time in the past and we weren't interested at that time because it seemed that we were already doing most of what was offered (that we needed) with perl scripts, SNMP, and our other OpenSource monitoring software. We did get Nortel Resource Manager way back then but that appears to have be replaced with something above.

Anyway, our network has expanded, we are implementing VOIP, and we are short staffed, so I'm thinking of revisting the product line to see if there is anything that will actually make managing our network easier and to assist in making it more resiliant.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

[Frankbr]

Hi brazenhead,

I am using COM ( Configuration and Orchestration Manager) to manage our Switches. Ca. 150
It superseeds the old ESM from Nortel. For Administration it is a nice Tool and all of the
newer Switches are supportet.
The Version 2.3 is stabile working, there is only a Problem to get the gbic Data and i am on a
Diskussion about that with Dominik at this Forum. The New COM has no alerting Funktion as
The Old ESM had so wie use another Tool for monitoring.
Hope I could help a littlebit.

Cheers

Frank

[Dominik]

Hi brazenhead,

from my point of view the jewel of the UCM applictions is COM.
It safes you a lot of time in yor daily work, you can do mass configuration and scheduled backups with it.
We installed a free trial and all of our staff that works with Avaya switches used it after one week as the primary configuration tool.
If you are familar with ESM you will find the same solution now web based with some addons.

I did also investigation on 3 other UCM application.
•   Visualization Performance and Fault Manager
Looks OK, but I stick with Nagios / Shinken for monitoring.

•   Virtualization Provisioning Service
VPS integrates your COM with your ESX vSpehere management. It will basicly configure your Uplinks to your ESX Cluster automtically.
In fact the SwitchUplinks aren΄t configured (you have to do taht task manually) by the VPS, it will really helps you when your DataCenter is running SPB.
In combination with SPB and VPS you can create networks on your VM ESX and the network will be configured automated by VPS.

•   IP Flow Manager
It is a good Flow analytics tool. But it only supports IPFIX and Netflow 5/9 when you have Flows in other formats you have to use an other Flow Analytics tool.

On the following page you can get free trial versions of the most UCM applicaions, and video overviews to the different products:

http://www.avaya.com/usa/product/avaya-data-solutions-management

Cheers

[brazenhead]

Thanks for the info. I'll check out the free trials when I get some time.