asterisk users - Aug 2010 - Should I move to 1.6 or 1.8, or stay with 1.4?

Hi list,

I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering with it
to move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my clients' 1.4 setups
have been rock solid and I don't want to put myself into any unnecessary
trouble. Those of you with solid experience with all these versions, what
would you suggest? What new and exciting enhancements would newer versions
bring and how about their stability and reliability? Or should I stay with
1.4?

Sincerely,

Zeeshan A Zakaria

--
www.ilovetovoip.com
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Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering with 
> it to move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my clients'
1.4
> setups have been rock solid and I don't want to put myself into any 
> unnecessary trouble. Those of you with solid experience with all these 
> versions, what would you suggest? What new and exciting enhancements 
> would newer versions bring and how about their stability and 
> reliability? Or should I stay with 1.4?
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Zeeshan A Zakaria
> 
> --
> www.ilovetovoip.com <http://www.ilovetovoip.com>
> 
If you are planning to move then perhaps look at 1.6 to give you a 
longer lifecycle with that release.
I wouldnt go with 1.8 as I dont believe it is out of beta yet or if it 
is, it is only just and I wouldnt risk it in a production enviroment.

>From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Zeeshan
Zakaria
>Subject: [asterisk-users] Should I move to 1.6 or 1.8, or stay with 1.4?
>Hi list,
>I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering with it
to move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my clients' 1.4 setups
have been rock solid and I don't want to put myself into any unnecessary
trouble. Those of you with solid experience with all these versions, what
would you suggest? What new and exciting enhancements would newer versions
bring and how about their stability and reliability? Or should I stay with
1.4?
>Sincerely,
>Zeeshan A Zakaria
My observations

1.       I'm still in the 1.4 tree;  I've dabbled in the 1.6 tree for
new
enhancements such as better AGI handling, but when push comes to shove, I
still like the 1.4 product better at this point.

2.       1.8 is still pretty much in Beta phase, but is the future direction
of the product.  If you're going to have these boxes 3 years from now, you
might want to bite that bullet now.

3.       If you're heavy into AGI and don't want to be bleeding edge,
1.6 is
probably your preferred path.

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We moved a 1.4 installation to a VMWare environment some time ago and it was
fairly uneventful.  Still, if it were me, I wouldn't change too many things
at once and I would first wait until what I currently run is stable under VM.  
Once stable, I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade and that's one of the nice
things about running in a virtual environment.  It's makes upgrades such as
that really easy, both from the standpoint of moving forward and reverting back,
if necessary.

From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces
at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Zeeshan Zakaria
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 6:51 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: [asterisk-users] Should I move to 1.6 or 1.8, or stay with 1.4?


Hi list,

I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering with it to
move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my clients' 1.4 setups
have been rock solid and I don't want to put myself into any unnecessary
trouble. Those of you with solid experience with all these versions, what would
you suggest? What new and exciting enhancements would newer versions bring and
how about their stability and reliability? Or should I stay with 1.4?

Sincerely,

Zeeshan A Zakaria

--
www.ilovetovoip.com<http://www.ilovetovoip.com>
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Thanks for sharing your experience Bruce. I am going to use OpenVZ and hope
it'll work fine. Is ESXi free or costs license, just in case OpenVZ
won't
work. The client I worked for, who was using OpenVZ had pretty moderately
busy asterisk servers and didn't have any issues with it.

Zeeshan A Zakaria

--
www.ilovetovoip.com

On 2010-08-24 10:45 AM, "Bruce Komito" <brucek at wpti.net>
wrote:

 We now run VMWare ESXi 4.0 on HP Proliant DL360 G5 and have not had any
issues.   A couple of years ago, we tried OpenVZ, but did not have good
results.  Don?t ask to me explain what the problem was, because that was the
problem?we couldn?t figure it out.  It was just unexplained erratic Asterisk
behavior that we did not experience on dedicated hardware.  And, we were not
using any PRI or other boards?just plain old SIP and IAX.  It could have
been OpenVZ or it could have been something we did, but the result was the
same.



*From:* asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:
asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] *On Behalf Of *Zeeshan Zakaria
*Sent:* Tuesday, August 24, 2010 7:16 AM


To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
*Subject:* Re: [asterisk-users] Should I move to 1.6 or 1.8, or stay with
1.4?





Did you use VMWare's hypervisor? I have no experience with it but I'll
be
using Proxmox with no...

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Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
>
> Hi list,
>
> I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering 
> with it to move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my 
> clients' 1.4 setups have been rock solid and I don't want to put 
> myself into any unnecessary trouble. Those of you with solid 
> experience with all these
>
Then I really wouldn't suggest moving to a virtual machine.  Timing it 
critical.

Doug


-- 

Ben Franklin quote:

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010, Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering with it
> to move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my clients' 1.4
setups
> have been rock solid and I don't want to put myself into any
unnecessary
> trouble. Those of you with solid experience with all these versions, what
> would you suggest? What new and exciting enhancements would newer versions
> bring and how about their stability and reliability? Or should I stay with
> 1.4?
Some of us are still using 1.2 because it's as stable and solid as it 
needs to be...

Gordon

Gorden, I agree with you and I moved to 1.4 only because I wanted to use the
'originate' command on asterisk CLI, and there was one more small little
feature difference which I don't remember now, but nothing more than that,
otherwise my 1.2 installation was just great. I know someone who didn't move
from 1.0.9 for a long time as it was working just fine for his setup, and he
had some serious call volume. Once I tried 1.6 and got in such a mess
regarding the real-time that decided to roll back. I think I would prefer to
keep 1.4 for production and install 1.6 or 1.8 for playing around with.
That's the good thing about virtualization that I can install multiple
servers not worrying about additional hardware or interference with rest of
the setup.

Zeeshan A Zakaria

--
www.ilovetovoip.com

On 2010-08-24 11:03 AM, "Gordon Henderson"
<gordon+asterisk at drogon.net<gordon%2Basterisk at drogon.net>>
wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010, Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I am planning a migration to virtual mac...
Some of us are still using 1.2 because it's as stable and solid as it
needs to be...

Gordon

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On Tuesday 24 Aug 2010, Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
> I am planning a migration to virtual machines, and was considering with it
> to move from 1.4 to one of the later versions. My and my clients' 1.4
> setups have been rock solid and I don't want to put myself into any
> unnecessary trouble. Those of you with solid experience with all these
> versions, what would you suggest? What new and exciting enhancements would
> newer versions bring and how about their stability and reliability? Or
> should I stay with 1.4?
I would suggest changing only one thing at a time.

If you only change one thing, and it doesn't work anymore, then you can be 
fairly confident that whatever you just changed broke it.

If you change two things, and it doesn't work anymore, you don't know
which of
the things you changed broke it.

(And yes, this is a rule I break all the time.  And I curse myself for it.)

Move your whole 1.4 setup untouched to a Virtual Machine, and see if still 
works.  If so, *then* think about upgrading Asterisk  (to 1.6, unless you're
feeling very brave or need some feature that isn't present in 1.6).


-- 
AJS

This info was useful. So now I have more than a year before I can think
about switching to a newer version.

Zeeshan A Zakaria

--
www.ilovetovoip.com

On 2010-08-25 12:34 PM, "Leif Madsen" <leif.madsen at
asteriskdocs.org> wrote:

On 10-08-24 09:59 AM, Gareth Blades wrote:
> Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
>
> If you are planning to move then perhaps look at 1.6 to give you a
> lo...
1.6.2 doesn't give you any longer of a life cycle (theoretically) than 1.4.
See
the following link:

http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk-versions

Leif.


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