atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Inter-Tel Telephones & Systems VoiceMail and UC servers on VMWare?

Hi,
I've got a Windows 2000 Machine that was installed in 04 with my Inter-Tel Axxess system. Since this machine is housing all of my auto attendant and Voicemails i'd like make it a priority to upgrade this within the next 6 months.

I'm trying to move some of my servers to a VMware environment next year and am researching how many i could consolidate.

Has anyone done this with inter-tel equipment before?

A 2nd option if i can't move it to VM ware would be to just build a new server with a RAID array, as a HD crash is my biggest fear now. How have you moved these boxes before? Just take it down on a sat or sunday and image the current box and deploy that image to the new hardware? Or is there a better way? Also does this need to be W2K or will XP work?

Thanks for any help!
- Andy

I feel your pain and see validity in your motives, however...there is always a however isnt there. Like most manufacturers of Voice mail and voice applications, they will only support voicemail applications on one of their boxes. Now if you want to try to make it fly on another chassis go for it but you will get zero support from your dealer and/or Inter-Tel. I cannot see any reason why you could not use XP, 2000 or even 2003 server as long as you can get the VPC/AIC card drivers to work on it. Honestly the 2000 drivers will probably work but if they dont you are on your own. This is if you have a VPU, if you have EM I would be more concerned as that box does alot internally. Again I would imagine that it would work but I have never done it so do at your own risk/peril.

Ya i know it's not "supported" but being an IT guy i'm comfortable doing it - just figured i'd see if anyone else has done this to save me some expirimentation time.
So far the only hangup i see are the 2 cards in the VPU machine, i figure if i can get the drivers for those i could use any machine iwant.

This will be something I try on a bench first to see if it works.
Just don't want to get cought with a bad HD and have no backup plan.

Thanks!

I've looked into this before..

The biggest issue is with the VPU is that all the cards are ISA. If you have a FAX card, and the AIC and one or two voice cards, that means you need 4 ISA slots. The only motherboard you are going to find that has at least 4 ISA slots now-a-days is Inter-Tel kit, max CPU speed somewhere around PIII 733MHz.

The drivers for those cards are a tad touchy. I wouldn't trust VMWare to not mess up access to them. Plus, anyway, would you want to run VMWare on a system that has 4 ISA slots and that old of CPU?

You could do RAID of some flavor, but again, you're looking at support RAID on some hardware that has at least 4 ISA cards. You're going to be looking at ancient stuff again.

IMHO, your best defense against failure is to have multiple real inter-tel VPUs sitting around (I've bought some on eBay). You can copy the avdap folder on over and have a reasonably up-to-date copy. Even better, setup a network copy of the data up to a server on a schedule. Have your spare sitting ready with some avdap folder of reasonable base config. If something fails, swap in the spare, and copy the data (ie. greetings and voice-mails) back down from the server repository. I don't think its going to be worth the headaches of trying to shoehorn ancient hardware into "current" machines. Sometimes brute redundancy is the easiest way.

I like dpmcintyres suggestions. The part that is going to go bad would be the HDD obviously. Install a backup agent or do a share level backup of c:\avdap\db and if you have a flame out restore that dir to a working HDD with Avdap installed and you are back in action.

Thanks for your advice - i didn't know the inter-tel stuff was ISA - yikes!
Is a more "modern" version of this VPU box, or is that what is sold even in brand new installs today?

I do have my Continuous Data Backup running on that system backung up the AVDAP\DB, and I have an image of the computer i took a few months ago so at least if the HD were to die i could just pop in a new one, reimage it, and restore the DB. Obviously that would take an hour or so - so i was looking for something a little quicker if that were to ever happen.
I guess the old fashioned way of redundancy works too....there isn't a way to have multple VPUs setup to mirror or anything is there?

VMWare was just a thought, as i'd like to get my physical server count down to as little as possible, but somethings aren't doable.

Thanks!

The newer stuff is still ISA as far as I know.

EM uses different boards and they are PCI but I think you are correct all VPU/rhetorex equipped units are ISA

I'd love to hear if someone can pull this off as I've got so many boxes for inter-tel here that I would like to consolidate to one machine (Unified Communicator, EM/VM, Call Center Server, CT Gateway).

As far as worrying about hard drive crashes in these machines I recently changed all our Inter-tel boxes to image based backups so that restoring the machines in case of a drive failure would be trivial. This has also allowed me (with some work and during off hours) do restore to a second disk, make massive changes or experimentation if needed and still go right back to the original disk if something happens.