Member Discussion
Transition / Migration Pains Between Onssi Ocularis 4.X And Ocularis 5.X?
Has anyone had as many pains as we have transitioning OnSSI from version 4 to version 5?
Our support calls have sky rocketed, we've seen cameras unlicensing themselves, software bugs in Client, etc. We've lost money supporting this system since the new version came out.
Anyone else having problems?
In our recent integrator survey results, we received a number of 4.x to 5.x complaints. I am not sure how wide the issues are, but you are unfortunately not alone.
I've forwarded this discussion to OnSSI for comment / response.
Undisclosed 1 Integrator I feel your pain. I have had so many support calls with them recently for so many different issues. To this point we have one customer completely give up on OnSSI and switch to Genetec. And we are actively trying to get our current OnSSI customers to switch to Milestone.
2, can you elaborate on some specific issues? It would help other integrators as well as OnSSI to deal / rectify them.
We have been a Gold dealer for many years. Extreme success with onssi. I have to agree, the recent overhaul has been a down hill turn. Milestone will honor onssi licenses and cutover is free if the customer is on a "SUP". We have done a few and keeping the video and settings is a plus and its easy.
Upgrading to Ocularis 5.0 has been a challenge and loosing the video is unacceptable for most customers.
Here are a few examples of issues that I have had.
One customer we decided to take advantage of the free base and client upgrade. Couldn't do the recorders because the hardware in the servers won't support it. So the upgrade went fine but then we noticed issues with areconts in the clients. These are the surround areconts. Some streams would just sit at negotiating and never come into the client but would always been online in the management application. Couldn't narrow it down to a specific model. It appeared to be at random. OnSSI support was limited due to the recorders being old. Was able to get it working for the most part by reducing to half resolution in the camera.
I have also had several different customers experience an issue with arecont surround and omni series cameras where in OnSSI goes completely grey at night. But if you log directly into the camera the image is displayed correctly. I have been in contact with support but I don't have a solution for this issue yet.
Had another issue somewhere where the entire config folder for the recorder disappeared which made th system completely offline. Luckily support was able to recreate me the config files that disappeared but still have no idea how it happened in the first place.
The way the new recorder operates in general has also caused issues. One server that was upgraded had a small C: drive for the OS but the server has 64GB of ram. Well the new software writes video to RAM which causes pagefile.sys on the C drive to grow upwards of 70GB. Which completely fills up the C drive cause the DM service to stop.
Then just general pains in setting up and working on the recorder.
We upgraded the Base and Client, kept the old recorder software for the specific reason that there is no "wizard" to transfer all of your settings etc. You basically have to rebuild your whole system from scratch.
When we were originally preparing to do this upgrade, the whole system, we had more than one person at ONSSI tech support ask "Why do you want to do that?" They aren't on the same page with the sales team, apparently.
My ultimate answer was "because my boss told me to." That's what happens when you go to too many ASIS conferences. All the flashy lights and rock'n'roll music gets in people's heads, and they start wanting to upgrade things.
Regarding the original question- no, we haven't had any issues. But we didn't upgrade the recorders.
Sounds like upgrading from ONSSI to Milestone is easier than ONSSI to ONSSI.
As an integrator, I have been an advanced certified individual in the OnSSI software since NetDVMS. I have worked with almost every version since then up until now. The difference between Ocularis 4.x and 5.x is minimal at the Base level. But the recording component on the back end of 5.x is about 5-7 years behind the version they were using from Milestone. In a word, it's horrible.
Camera licensing just "disappearing" is nothing new for me. It happens a LOT in RC-E. But I think that is a fault of the milestone backend, and not the OnSSI Base since most of these problems come from the Milestone side.
The client does not seem to have changed all that much. If you are having a problem with the client, I suggest you try a version of the client that is a little bit older. I use 3.x client and have excellent results across the board. Well....as excellent as you can expect from OnSSI software.
My suggestion to all of my customers running any pre-5.x version of OnSSI is to wait to upgrade it until I feel confident that it will not break anything. And I continue to evaluate OnSSI's new version myself. Having recently taken the advanced course in OnSSI and having played with their new SeeTec recorder, i'm not recommending any upgrades at this time. As such, they can not continue to buy licenses for their Milestone backend unfortunately, but luckily for me, all of my OnSSI customers like to keep extra licenses on hand. So we are not in a bind to move forward with the new version yet. Not to mention there are MANY features in the milestone version that would no longer function on a new OnSSI SeeTec recorder.
That said, despite what OnSSI suggests, I would upgrade the base to 5.x, but leave all of the rest of the recorders running the milestone backend. This should not cause to much headache as any pre-existing issues would still be in the recorder, but, hopefully, there will not be any or many new bugs in the new base version. This will give you the ability to test the new recorder on a test server and evaluate it properly before putting it into production.
Best of luck to you.
Just to be fair to ONSSI, this is not necessarily a case of Milestone's recorder is better than SeeTec's recorder, (although that may be true).
If you were going from legacy SeeTec (pre ONSSI) to Milestone, even with Milestone's far bigger driver database, there would be (in any sizable system) the inevitable camera that wasn't supported or didn't work the same or look the same etc.
Maybe you can fix it with firmware, drivers etc, maybe not. But there's no guarantee any of it will work, but still there is always something to try or to wait for
Driver Blues, plain and simple.
Ocularis 5.0 Drivers at a glance
Posted on another thread from an integrator:
"I have done approx 5 4.x to 5.1 & older dvms migrations w/o much success. had to call support for every one. eventually issue where resolved but not much fun. BTW no such thing as a migration in the recorder. only the base."
5.2 is coming out, it includes a recorder migration tool, embedded video below:
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