Virtualizing Your Cudatel Appliance
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Now that the Cudatel VoIP PBX system has gone away, people working with older Cudatel appliances are left wondering what they can do to keep those babies running. Obviously, until the hardware dies the boxes will continue to work, just without any available support, patches, or updates. This means that everyone with a Cudatel should be desperately seeking an alternative solution as quickly as possible.
One option that you may consider is a P2V migration - taking your existing Cudatel appliance and virtualizing it. This addresses the fear of hardware failure (one that should have existed already given the fragility of the original appliance) but does not address the massively out of date software problem. While this can be done, Cudatel runs on CentOS 5 which is extremely old (even CentOS 7 is long in the tooth today) and hails from 2007 (so think Windows 2003 R2 in Windows ages!) This is ridiculously old (and dangerous) to be running today under the best of conditions.
Because of the extreme age of the system, combined with Cudatel having stripped the system down so that it would only run on the Cudatel appliance hardware, there is no reasonable and certainly no safe means of virtualizing this system today.
If you have a Cudatel system still in use, your only real option is to replace it and to replace it as soon as possible. Of course, vastly superior, totally free solutions exist that will fix the support, hardware, and software issues that the Cudatel had; so this is an excellent move. The Cudatel provides a perfect example of the dangers of the appliance approach for PBXs. There is no reason to create the large cost and risk of an appliance when you can do a VM in an production way for free (the Cudatel appliance hardware could never be considered business class in any way.)
While many options exist, I would recommend that the first item on your short list for evaluation be FreePBX. Look at other options, of course, like Issabel, 3CX, FusionPBX, or Wazo. But FreePBX should be your first and foremost consideration at the current time. It will run in a tiny VM, is extremely well known (loads of resources for it here in this community from people like myself, @JaredBusch, @EddieJennings, and more.) Both in assistance, and online guides. It is completely free, but also has vendor support, and many third party support options (like @NTG and @Bundy-Associates .)
Trying to bandaid an old system like Cudatel makes no sense. It is dangerous and, at best, a major effort for an extremely fragile stop gap. It is a fraction of the effort to move from the poor product that was Cudatel to one of many excellent, and free, enterprise class products.
Go ahead, download FreePBX and start playing with it. You could have installed it while reading this article!
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@scottalanmiller said in Virtualizing Your Cudatel Appliance:
Go ahead, download FreePBX and start playing with it. You could have installed it while reading this article!
Any good installation guides here on ML?
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@dustinb3403 said in Virtualizing Your Cudatel Appliance:
@scottalanmiller said in Virtualizing Your Cudatel Appliance:
Go ahead, download FreePBX and start playing with it. You could have installed it while reading this article!
Any good installation guides here on ML?
@JaredBusch has a great series of posts for FreePBX here.
