OTRS Appliance Future Support

[need2gcm]

Its continuing to look more and more like the OTRS Appliance is going to be abandoned mid support cycle. Is this true? Does anyone have any idea why?

[jojo]

There are several causes like flexibility and maintainability the appliance was stopped. We suggest to use a self operated Linux system, or much better a managed system

[need2gcm]

That is exactly what the Appliance was billed as. I understand of course that a self installed and self managed OS is more supportable from a local IT standpoint. But the whole original point of the Appliance was that it was going to be a standardized, maintained, and supported system for OTRS.

And it is very interesting that support for the Appliance vanished as soon as OTRS began heavily advertising their paid, hosted solution. It is very understandable why they would prefer people to use that system, as OTRS will directly make money off of the use of that, and not just support.

However, abandoning a system that was originally being shown off as the ideal system for OTRS mid release and without any communication or warning is far from ideal. A proper way to handle it would be to announce an end of life for the product, and at best support the Appliance until the end of support for the 4.x.x branch.

[jojo]

the OTRS appliance was mainly build as an simple way to test OTRS, like the windows installer was build years before. Both were never suggested to be used in productive environments. The appliance will not expand with your demands (like growing databases and external connections).

You'll also find (sometimes) badly maintained appliances or docker images with OTRS created by 3rd party, which also mostly where build for testing and development purposes.

You can use OTRS free of charge by installing it on your own servers, even migrate from appliance to an own hosted system. If you don't have the knowledge, man power etc, switch to a fully managed system.

[need2gcm]

Apologies if I came off aggressive in my posts. Maybe its a bit of a language barrier or I just misunderstood.

I still really wish someone, even maybe just a community group, would take over maintaining the Appliance. Perhaps I'll clone our VM running our Appliance and experiment with unlocking it and turning it into a regular Linux installation, and if successful, document my steps here.

[crythias]

As much as I'd want to agree with you, need2gcm, it really is a potential liability issue, along with the maintenance hassle.

For as many moving parts as need to be maintained within a core product, it's like herding cats to maintain the underlying operating system for security and bug fixes, which detracts from the efforts to maintain the core product. Plus the fact that once it's in the wild, the fact that one has submitted it increases the support request threshold. That is, now it's not just questions about the core product, but also how to support the whole appliance. Considering the people who are introduced to Linux in general through the appliance and then come here asking for support on the appliance rather than the application, means the scope of support is getting too big. And that's just for this volunteer forum.

That of course doesn't mention all the tweaks and customization that need to be made to the core product for demonstration purposes that are not in core for the standard installation.

[need2gcm]

I suppose I can sympathize with that.

I'll be pressing forward with my conversion of the Appliance (on a copy of course), and if successful, I'll post my steps here. If I can't convert it to a normal Debian install, what would you suggest for a method to migrate all of the existing ticket and ITSM data to a new OTRS install?

EDIT:
First interesting note on my travels, what is the package: ex-otrs-4.00.00.D17585_amd64.deb ?

[jbaptiste]

Hi,

First of all apologies for reviving a year old thread, but I think its worth mentioning this OTRS docker container, which could be used as an appliance replacement. These are some of this container's features:

• Supports both OTRS 4 and 5 latest versions
• It isn't a monolithic container that bundles the database server, it includes a separate pre-tuned Mariadb container (as specified on the install docs) and a SMTP relay container
• Includes a docker-compose configuration file to easily start all services
• Can be pre-configured on startup using environment variables, for example to select the number generator, set the postmaster email fetch time, OTRS and mariadb root user passwords, the interface language, starting point for the ticket number among many others.
• Start containers from a backup file (very useful for locally testing and debugging problems )
• Have been thoroughly tested on orchestration platforms like docker cloud and rancher.

We have been using these images on production for several companies for more than a year without issues. Check out this blog post for more details on how to use it.