This is the newly planned upgrade weekend.
We had to postpone the upgrade of our Hosted IPPBX system in March because of the developing situation in Ukraine and a large enough part of the people involved in the upgrade being in that area.
It looks as if we can now safely and correctly replan the upgrade for the weekend of the 15 - 18th of April but we will postpone if the need arises or if our people are in need to cancel.
With thanks for your understanding and support and kind regards
the Voyced management team & staff.
We are going to implement a major jump and upgrade the Voyced Hosted IPPBX platform to the next stable version, V9.5.3, over the weekend of 15 - 16 - 17 - 18th of April 2022.
(and for those that noticed it, yes, we are making the jump to version.3 rather than version .1 so even more and better already)
Description:
Over the last year and a bit, we have invested heavily in extra hardware, testing and adding functionalities to our Hosted IPPBX solution.
Some of these functionalities have already been 'released' into the wild (some in a smaller group, some for everyone already) without actually notifying you.
This will all change from now on as we have many more functions and services already lined up and we'll let you know and communicate more to let you know.
With this upgrade, we are going to make a giant leap forward and you'll love the extra features that we have prepared for you!
As always, any upgrade has been tested very extensively in our testing and extra created redundant environments before we decided that the actual implementation can go ahead.
This is so that the upgrade on the live systems should go through quickly and without a flaw.
The upgrade procedure has been separated into several parts spread over the three days of the weekend and we'll create separate announcements for these steps as pre-tests have passed correctly, we get nearer the time and planning is set.
The simplified steps involved will be:
Friday
- Friday evening: Remove portal access to force a data freeze
- Friday evening: Start migrating current database clusters to the new database clusters in all data centres and apply Hosted IPPBX patches.
The Existing Hosted IPPBX solution is untouched throughout the upgrade until hand-over to the new Hosted IPPBX platform version.
Saturday
- Saturday morning: Test new Hosted IPPBX solution with migrated database clusters.
- Saturday night: If testing is successful, instruct the SBC to direct customer traffic to the new Hosted IPPBX solution networks in all data centres (active calls will be terminated).
If significant issues are found at any point in the process we will revert to the 'old' IPPBX platform version.
Sunday
Early Sunday morning: Monitor and continue to test the new Hosted IPPBX solution.
In conjunction with the manufacturer of the base solutions and our development and tech teams, we will apply any quick fixes required (there should be none).
If any major issues are identified, the SBCs are instructed to move traffic back to the 'old' IPPBX platform version.
If no issues are found, we will re-enable portal access at some point on Sunday night or early Monday morning.
End time: 18/04/2020 07:00 (UTC)
Apart from the mentioned 'data freeze', to prevent settings from changing during this process, there should have little or no impact on customers in the short term.
The risks will likewise be very low because of our extensive testing and the ability to revert to the current version if so required.
The extra benefit from this major upgrade comes in the form of future upgrades, both in terms of the features that become available and the flexibility of their introduction.
The excellent news and just some of the new options this will give us all
This upgrade will give many new security and stability features and will further implement the geographic redundancy that we have started to roll out in 2017 and have made available for Free to the whole of our customer base as the first major service update in 2019.
If you have not set up/changed your local devices and/or systems to use Geographic redundancy, we strongly urge you to do so a.s.a.p.
All the information you need is in our Basic Setup knowledgebase article, as always.
So, we're sure you are curious and want to know what is going to be new and improved, right?!
Amongst the numerous improvements, additions and preparations for future features in the background, there are many new and improved features for you, the user.
The following is only a limited list of functions that are improved or added that you will see/experience on your user side:
- Call transfer recall so that your 'blind' transferred call comes back to you if the transfer does not get picked up
- Higher security, including the often asked Extended length password
- Personalized response messages for incoming calls (plays before any call is answered, forwarded, or directed to voicemail)
- Call recording announcement
- xDR download enhancement
- Preparation for enhanced support for IPv6 endpoints
- Call supervision with 3 modes: spy, whisper, barge-in
- Added language support for a few new languages and we've updated some languages too
- Custom prompt for the dial-by-name directory
- Sound Quality Check function
- Call Barring Management
- Enhancements to the VoiceMail services and messages
- Up to 25 times faster processing of Voicemail
- SIP Update as an additional keepalive request option
- Enhanced on-demand call recording and Call recording announcement
- Role-based Hosted IPPBX access which you, the client, can set.
- Extended configuration of music on hold for Call queue and Call queue announcements configuration enhancements
- Further improved handling and troubleshooting of audio streams and single audio issues where the user's local equipment doesn't 'follow the rules'
- Improved Paging / Intercom function
- Many new enhancements that will help us troubleshoot any issues, such as registration issues, you may come across
- We're extending the API calls library so we can create even better and more integrated custom solutions for your situation
- The current upgrade and expansion are done in such a way that we can roll out future updates and upgrades without any downtime
- and much, much more
All user-side functions will be made available as soon as we can and we will notify you of the important ones separately.
So, make sure that you are subscribed to the mailing list(s) and we will send everyone those notifications that we deem important enough!
(you can always check your mailing list subscription with our support team)
We thank you for your patience and understanding and apologise for the inconvenience that this essential maintenance work may cause.
If there are any questions or concerns, please contact our technical support team.
Kind Regards
the Voyced Technical team
Take note: If you currently implemented IP numbers rather than our FQDN in any of your devices (such as firewalls), please reach out to us with a ticket asap as this whole exercise will mean (some of) our IP numbers will change!
Updates:
20220406:
Estimated planning:
- Thursday (14th) 19:00: A full database and cluster snapshot will be taken.
Users can continue to make changes, but these will be lost after switchover.
For example, if call recording is activated after the snapshot is taken, call recording will not be enabled after the upgrade without applying it again. - Good Friday (15th) between 20:00 – 23:00. Traffic switch-over window.
The actual outage, sub 5 mins. Revert if traffic is not successfully carried on by the fall-back clusters. - Good Friday (15th) between 20:00 – 23:00. Portals unavailable
From just prior to switch over - between 20:00 – 23:00. - Good Friday (15th) between 21:00 – 24:00. Portals available
1 hour after traffic switch-over, any data changes are now retained. - Saturday (16th) early hours:
- If traffic switch-over is successful, then a full check of all control panels, the portal, etc starts.
- If the switch-over is unsuccessful, repeat of Friday switch-over during the same period on Saturday. - Easter Sunday (17th): Final check and migration signed off.
- Easter Monday (18th): Contingency (not planned to be utilised).
20220414:
The creation of a full snapshot of the system has been initiated.
The portal will not be closed for access but from this point onward any changes that users make will be overwritten when the switch over is completed.
20220415:
The database copy and verification process has taken several hours longer than scheduled.
Whilst not ideal, the potential for delays like this was anticipated which is why there is a degree of contingency built into the plan.
Because of this delay, there has been a knock-on effect on today’s task.
It is now likely that the earliest we would be in a position to make the traffic switchover is between 6:00 and 9:00 am on Saturday morning.
However, this is not out of hours and the traffic levels on the network would be high and the disruption unacceptable.
We are therefore looking at utilising the backup window of 20:00 – 23:00 on Saturday evening for the switchover.
20220418:
The whole upgrade procedure has been completed as we had hoped.
Total downtime has been less than 2 x 5 minutes which is amazing and even less than we had anticipated and hoped for.
I want to thank our whole team for making that come true.
There were a few very minor things that needed to be solved of which none would have affected you, our clients so we're very happy with all that.
The last little things will be solved within the next hours.
If you, our clients, run into anything that doesn't work or is missing since the upgrade, please let us know immediately by starting a support ticket and we'll dive into that asap.
Hopefully, we'll be able to call the upgrade complete and an overwhelming success tomorrow :-)
Soon we will start notifying you of the new and exciting things we can offer you!
With thanks for your understanding and kind regards
Hein Kuenen
general manager
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
