Virgin Media Leased Lines :: Planned works 26/8/2022

We have been advised of Emergency planned works affecting a number of lines this evening:

Planned Work Start (Local UK): 26/08/2022 00:01
Planned Work End (Local UK): 26/08/2022 06:00

Impact: There will be a loss of service at some point during the timeframe stated above whilst we complete the maintenance work.

The service outage should only last for up to 1 Hour, however a 6 hour time frame has been given in the event of any unforeseen circumstances.

This is for emergency planned work to repair a fault on the network in the Papworth area. Resolution for fault reference: F010061503

Customers on  the lines Virgin have listed have been notified.

At Risk :: Switch Maintenance – 26/08/2022 0:01 – 02:00

Our Juniper Switch in London Harbour Exchange Square is showing an error when any new config is committed to it.

Juniper have provided their suggested work-around/fix for this and we will perform this just after midnight tonight.

There should be no impact from this work at all – However we would rather announce this as at risk in case of any unexpected impact

We will update this once the work completes

[update 26/08/22 8:30]
The work last night while not causing any issue did not resolve the issue, The vendor has supplied a replacement Core Juniper switch and this will be swapped out later tonight

Planned Work – Virgin Media [05/09/2022]

Virgin Media are performing a network upgrade on their code network between  midnight and 6am. There’s an expected downtime of 5 minutes. This has been reported to affect a small number of our lines on both our London bearer or terminated in London.

From their announcement


There will be a loss of service at some point during the timeframe stated above whilst we complete the maintenance work.

The planned outage is expected to occur between 00:01am and 02:00am and should only last for up to 30 minutes or if notified for 5 minutes where this is for Network Re-convergence only. However, should we incur any card failure and a replacement is required then as a worse case we will need to use the 6 hour change window.

This work is to upgrade software on equipment on our Network at multiple sites.


 

We will monitor these lines and ensure that they restore during the announced window

We apologise for any issues from this work

Planned Work – Virgin Media [09/09/2022]

Virgin Media are performing a network upgrade on their code network between  midnight and 6am. There’s an expected downtime of 30 minutes. This has been reported to affect a small number of our lines on both our London bearer or terminated in London.

From their announcement


There will be a loss of service at some point during the timeframe stated above whilst we complete the maintenance work.

The planned outage is expected to occur between 00:01am and 02:00am and should only last for up to 30 minutes or if notified for 5 minutes where this is for Network Re-convergence only. However, should we incur any card failure and a replacement is required then as a worse case we will need to use the 6 hour change window.

This work is to upgrade software on equipment on our Network at multiple sites.


 

We will monitor these lines and ensure that they restore during the announced window

We apologise for any issues from this work

At Risk – Network Changes 6/8/22 – 7/8/22 [update 1]

As part of our plan to enhance our network capacity and resilience over the next few days we will be migrating a number of core links to a new model of EPVN. The new config will be in place before any old links are removed. However there is a risk through this for brief drops and routing changes being visible.

This has already been tested in our lab and the configuraton is in place the final changes are just to move from the old configuration to the new setup

We apologise for the short notice for this work

We will update as the work progresses

[Update 1]
The work on the IBR core routers completed yesterday bringing our new Manchester core routers all live. There is some work this evening on our Juniper Core routers – again we don’t expect any substantal issues but you may notice some routing changes and bried periods of packet loss as the new routing converges

At Risk – Generator Service – Huntingdon Data Centre – 15/07/2022

Our Supplier Engineers will be performing their regular service on our Generator system at our Huntingdon Data Centre during the day of 15/7/22

This should have no impact on services but we treat this ‘at risk’ in case of any unexpected issues. The only possible impact here is that the auto changeover in case of a power failure will not function – However our UPS will be available and will cover the power until the Generator can be manually started

We will update this as the work completes

At Risk – UPS Service – Huntingdon Data Centre – 14/07/2022

Our Supplier Engineers will be performing their regular service on our UPS system at our Huntingdon Data Centre during the day of 14/7/22

This should have no impact on services but we treat this ‘at risk’ in case of any unexpected issues. NOTE that we have three resilient UPS modules and only one will be worked on at a time

We will update this as the work completes

 

Emergency Planned Work [10/07/2022]

Following the recent issue on our core switch issue – our switch vendor has asked us to urgently upgrade the firmware version on our Juniper switches to a new release they have provided us to clear a bug located through their investigations.

Due to the potential of a repeat of the previous issue we are performing the upgrade this evening to ensure there is no impact on service this coming week and to ensure the service is stable and with full resilience for the week.

In normal circumstances this would be performed out of hours / however to ensure that we have the resources available should any unexpected issues occur we are performing these upgrades through this evening meaning that IF we need to reboot / upgrade the core routers we can perform this later

The customer affect of this work will be a short period of packet loss when the affected switch reloads with the latest version of the firmware – there may be a small number of sorter periods of packet loss when other (not directly connected) switches reboot.

We anticipate the switch work will complete in the next 20 minutes

Again we apologise for the short notice on this change

 

 

Switch Issue – Telehouse West [resolved]

We are aware of an issue affecting one of our core switches in Telehouse West. this is also causing some disturbance in connections on other traffic intermittently.

Our engineers are working on this and we hope to have an update in the next 30 minutes

[resolved 01:30]
On-site engineers have rebooted one of our core switches in Telehouse West ans service is now back. Our network engineers are investigating the cause of this and we will work to ensure there is no further disruption here

Switch Upgrades – Telehouse 7/4/22 22:00 – 8/4/22 6:00

We are planning to replace our Juniper EX Series core switches in Telehouse with a newer more powerful model to allow for network growth and increased stability.

We are currently planning on working on the first two sites in Telehouse on Thursday 7th April – we will be working on one site at a time. During the work services will be at risk and access to directly connected connected servers and routers will be affected. Switches will be pre-configured and we hope that the outage per site will not exceed 2 hours. Once we are happy that all woek on one site is complete and the network is stable we will then work on the second site.

In many cases services connected will move to an alternative site – However with some connections including OFNL lines, these will be down for thr duration of the work.

We will update post before and during the work