Moving network from EdgeOS to VyOS

We’re interested in moving our network to VyOS. Currently we have north of 600 EdgeOS devices. Most of those are customer routers, not core equipment, and we’re happy keeping those as is, unless stock continues to be impossible to find. I believe we’d have 60 to 70 core EdgeOS devices that in time, either due to failure or just upgrade time, we’d like to move to VyOS. I just purchased a couple used Lanner boxes to play with. Obviously committing to the LTS takes a monetary investment. Is it safe/common to run some production stuff on the rolling release? I for sure wouldn’t start with anything too mission critical and would like keep an EdgeOS device onsite as a backup router but I’m guessing the rolling release would be as stable or more so than any combo of EdgeOS + UI hardware. We’ve been really happy with it, but the stock situation pushed us over the edge to look for something that was less vendor locked. Also I like the option to buy more horsepower for specific sites if I need it. UI’s hardware is always on the brittle edge of being tapped out.

Hi @trendal , as you know, VyOS platform is open-source and strongly supported by the community, but at the same time has paid subscription plans that provide you with the possibility to install the system using a rolling release or release candidate, play around to check if it satisfies your needs and moves to the paid support later. It’s recommended to use LTS releases in the production networks but anyway you can start with rolling images for basic and non-critical tasks at your own risk… VyOS Team and Community try to help you anyway through the public channels, resources and documentation. Also, you can check this page for information about contributors and their privileges. Hope this information will be helpful and in case if you decide to start using VyOS, welcome to the community :grinning:

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Hi @trendal , we are in a very similar situation. We’ve been using EdgeOS in the backbone and it has served us well. Still does, but I’m afraid UBNT’s plan to put everything under UISP control will end that within the next few years when they EOL the ER-4/6 and/or ERX. This is why we decided to port our SDN tools library from EdgeOS to VyOS which went smoothly as they are still quite similar, even down to the lower level APIs. It’s not about the money but we decided to base our efforts on one of the 1.3 release candidates for now, sometimes running our toolset on the latest 1.4 in an attempt to find out early what is going to hit us anyway, sooner or later, even if we went with the LTS version. That is to say: VyOS release candidates and even rolling releases are stable enough so you can pick one of them and stick to it - which would make it your “personal” LTS version for a few years. Whenever you decide to re-base your routers onto some newer version, you will have to handle the changes, some of them breaking changes maybe, but that wouldn’t be any different if you upgrade from one LTS version to the next.

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Thanks for the comments. I feel like there will be many Edgerouter’s shipped yet before they EOL them but I’d like to be well prepared before that day comes. And as I mentioned, I want more power for some of our bigger towers.