VyOS Networks Blog

Hi everyone,

This summer,  Sentrium, an IT consulting company ran by some of long time VyOS developers and users, launched commercial support for VyOS, something that we think will make VyOS more attractive for enterprise and service provider networks and give the VyOS project some funding and ensure its sustainable development and growth.

We also would like to say huge thanks to all of our existing customers for the commitment to the VyOS project and for your trust in us! You are contributing to the VyOS development and we are really happy to see such interest from companies around the world. Thank you!

Based on these few months of experience with VyOS support, we decided to adjust our support plans based on customer feedback You can view the new plans at this web page: https://sentrium.io/vyos-commercial-support/

We tried to cover common use cases which we observing:

• Small companies and nonprofit organizations with budget constraints
• Companies with internal expertise which just need a “formal” support contract due to the business requirements.
• Businesses who need phone support and hands-on assistance with strict SLAs for mission critical applications.

So, at a glance, how our support from vendors:

• All support plans cover all routers in the company, no matter if this production instance, or you just spin up another VyOS in your lab. You don’t need get to pay more when your network grows, or wait to get support contracts for new routers.

• Initial configuration and environment review is included in each plan, and this allows us to suggest config improvements and also shorten resolution times (we can go directly to issue, bypassing topology discovery)

• We only employ people with real networking knowledge and do not do anything to artificially make response time appear shorter than it is (e.g. by sending a form reply). We do not offer guaranteed short response time for all plans, but you can be sure the first reply you get includes some useful information about your problem. For email support, relatively long response time also allows us to do some research about your problem, try a solution in a lab, or consult a maintainer or a contributor, if we cannot offer a useful response offhand.

From Cyber Monday and until end of the year we’ll be running a promotion: everyone who buys a support subscription also gets free hand on assistance hours. The basic plan comes with one free hour, the standard plan comes with four, and the production support plan comes with eight.

We know there are still a number of people running Vyatta Core and who may want to switch to VyOS. Switching to a new system is always a concern, so if you are using Vyatta Core, you can use the hands on assistance hours for migration to VyOS. But with all improvements and, most importantly, security fixes that have been added, and will be added by 1.1.8 and then 1.2.0, upgrade is very important.

If you are running Vyatta Core 6.5 or 6.6, it can be upgraded to VyOS as if it was a new Vyatta version, with a few minor caveats. If your version is 6.4 or earlier, there are some features that may require manual config rewrite, which shouldn’t take too long unless your config is particularly large. We have successfully upgraded versions as old as 6.0 to VyOS without any problems. If, no matter how unlikely, you are still using VC 5.0, things get interesting, since it didn’t have the image upgrade yet, but even that is doable and has been done before (though if you can, we suggest that you reinstall and we can help with migrating the config).