 Tom here for more systems and Unify has been busy writing updates and bug fixes for the Unify 6.x Series controller. I say 6.x because there's actually been several updates and we waited on a few of them because well, they didn't go as well as we had expected and I say we because I'm talking about the community and I do talk specifically a lot about Riley who is CEO of Hostify. Hostify provides cloud controllers that they maintain for people who want to maintain their or don't want to maintain. I should say their Unify controller. You can let Hostify handle it for you. Yes, there's an offer code down below. I'm a big fan of the Hostify product. We recommend it to a lot of people also Riley being much more forthcoming with information than Unify themselves are. This post was just done just from the other day. They finished updating 1676 Unify servers to version 6.2.2.5. Matter of fact, I've also updated mine to 6.2.2.6. And that accounts for over a hundred thousand ubiquity devices connected to the servers. And it's working quite well, except a few little things. And that's why I want to cover some of the changes and some of the bigger changes that came from this update. Now, one thing to keep in mind is Unify is kind of alone in her category. I've done talks before about Unify competitors. It's not easy to switch away from them because there's not a lot of companies that offer you a self hosted controller option that works at the scale Unify does and doesn't have a bunch of well recurring licensing fees attached to it. So for those of you wondering, why are you still using Unify? There's a lot of reasons over a hundred thousand devices are in Hostify alone. And we know a ton of people that you know have their own controllers and having using Unify for much the same reason. It's hard to compete with that. There's just not a lot of other companies that don't want you to attach to a recurring license fee in their cloud. Alright, before we get too far off topic and dive into these details. If you want to learn more about me and my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you want to hire a short project including Unify Consulting there's a hires button right at the top. We're not a reseller of the products but you can hire us to help configure and set up your network and integrate all of it together. If you want to support this channel other ways just affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services that we talk about on this channel. And obviously we do talk a lot about Unify. That's why I wanted to mention neither me nor Riley are under any direct affiliation with Unify. We just are integrators. He happens to sell a platform to host it. We just do a lot of consulting on it. Now this is the Unify controller 6.217 and there's a lot of things on there but the first one made me chuckle a little bit. Unify and granted it's absolutely their right to do so. They kind of advertise if you don't have a UDM Pro that you should purchase a UDM Pro. And I thought it was funny that they didn't allow it to be dismissed when they first came out with the 6.2 version I think is when it showed up. And now they finally added a feature to dismiss the advertisement and the controller. Now I don't really see this as much of a big deal and if they're trying to push more product more of the power to them. We do not though really recommend any of the Unify routing equipment because it really falls flat when you have any advanced routing needs. For basic routing needs and home users yeah probably works great but for businesses that want some of the advanced use cases I don't feel that the USG line or the UDM or the UDM Pro line of Unify routing equipment is really all that great. We really focus on using their switches and access points so that is the perspective that I come from. That being said a question that comes up quite a bit is the Layer 3 switching and routing for static routes. There's a few switches now that support this and they're slowly working on it. I don't know it's to me not in the best solution. So if you have a need for that I'm still not usually recommending the Unify switches but I'm happy to see that they're still developing and moving forward with that feature on there and maybe some point I'll revisit it and try to see how good it actually is and get some statistics on it of how fast it can actually do that type of routing. Cool they have it that they're but it feels more like they're checking a marketing click box than actually taking the time to build really good and proper Layer 3 routing rules that you could do within the particular switches. But they have a lot of little things over here that I will leave links to all this so you can read through all the details. This though is more improvements that came with the 6.2.2.3. Then we have the 6.2.2.5 and then finally the 6.2.2.6 which really just fixed some IPsec VPN problems. The last few minor updates were not a lot to talk about most of the big changes happened in these ones here. Now that being said let's actually look at those changes and the big one is going to be the user interface and a terrible user experience they created with this. Let me explain this really quick. The Unify interface has been similar but enhanced over time they've been refining it. I actually think this is very usable I can go to my devices and manage them relatively easily without much headache it works quite well. As a matter of fact one of the things I like and thought it was weird they took the time to change this where is the new switch and one of the reasons we updated this is the new new Unify aggregation switch and you know because it's got 25 gig they did some recoloring to show which ports are plugged in we only have a couple things plugged in right now so they've been changing some of the nuances. When you switch to the new UI which we'll switch to it's also weird because they changed the color of it but they're really minor changes. Now this UI obviously is very functional and I can do things like this but Unify is insistent on bugging people to get to the new user interface. One thing I want to show is like the clients real quick here this is a very functional screen where we look up clients see where they're connected it tells me what port they're plugged into so I can see that this is plugged into studio lab 10g or this is plugged into front 24s name of the switch port number 20. This is really nice concise information even with the little search here so we can find things I like that this is on here but going to settings user interface and after a lot of people update it drops you into the new user interface and this is where me and Riley started the conversation of basically this interface is just hot garbage I don't know any way to describe it than a positive light first problem of course once you dismiss the advertisement for the udm pro I'm left with just this because I don't use the usg so I just get this weird blobbed interface here that just shows me some access points they did update the topology here which makes it look a little sharper but if you do in display options show all clients once again doesn't let you zoom out far enough to be particularly useful so that's not that's not really doing much and the devices let's look at those all right and find the unify aggregation switch but it's no longer a pop out window so I can set things side by side when I want to look at things which makes this not very useful and also one of the things that's missing in here you go to device they've tried to consolidate things in these little pull downs but not all the functionality is in here for example I can forget the vice but they remove the ability for me to move it now you have to kind of switch back and forth between the two interfaces in order to make that work which means pretty much stay in the old interface the other thing that is interesting is if you stay in this interface too long one of the things Riley had pointed out as he noticed with several clients if few people are using this too long it seems to occasionally crash the controller and you just have to restart the service strange behavior that a new interface would cause the back end to crash but this is what unify has been working on with it but there are a couple reasons you may need to go here and I want to cover those that's why I switched to the new interface one is the wi-fi and you go to the wi-fi you can see it actually lists the different networks right here and when we edit a network like we'll go ahead and edit this one here we go down to advanced they have a wi-fi scheduler so that's cool they have that but you can only access the scheduler to make adjustments via the new interface everything else is done in parity so you can do pretty much all the other functions in the old interface except for this but if you set it in here it still works when you go to the other interface so that's one thing you may need to switch for and the other one's going to be data retention they move that over so if we go here to I believe it's an advanced feature and we type in retention and it'll there we go it'll bring us down to the data retention this has been removed from the primary interface and moved over into only the new interface so that's kind of strange and the really confusing part though is when you try to build some of the new networking it's kind of missing when you do add network enable network name the router it only lists these it doesn't seem to have the normal vlan settings it's a little bit more confusing how they did this in the new interface so for the most part I'd recommend definitely going with and staying in the classic settings unless there's something you need such as setting the data retention or that so we'll go back over here to classic settings go down here get rid of the interface yes deactivate it refresh the page and you'll go back to normal like it was before where you actually have some usable interface take a second to load hey look there we go shows all the switches shows my experience that probably thinks would be better if I have under unified gateways but I can assure you it would not be improved if we had that but other than that we go back over here like the settings and it still brings you back to the same old school network interface that you're used to if you've been using unify for a while that is obviously much more functional but among things they still have that are broken the vlan is missing here and their answer is oh you should be using the new interface for it but I don't really find that to be too big of a deal because you can just go set it right here now main reason we updated support for wpa3 connections support for the new wi-fi 6 and support for the unify aggregation pro switch are the big reasons we moved over to it so I would definitely say if you're interested in upgrading always back up first have a snapshot everything ready in case you have to reload it but it's okay to load the new version this is a message we get a lot of you know hey tom have you moved all the way up to that latest release of 6.2.26 and me and riley have both decided we've you know we're going to go ahead and move over to it and we haven't had any real problems since we did all of our customers are still online we only have I think right now one customer left that's using a usg and that upgraded perfectly fine so we really haven't run into any particular scenarios or problems with the latest version everything seems to be going well as long as the users aren't going into and seeing as we're the users for ours as in my staff is the one using it to manage our clients we never use the new UI but riley obviously has been setting notices out to a lot of his user base because he's managing your controllers and saying look just stay away from that new user interface so yes upgrade go ahead and stay away from the user interface unless you're trying to set a you know time schedule on your wi-fi go in there just for that switch it back and hopefully your upgrade path will go easy if you have questions comments concerns or things you want to learn more about regarding unify leave some comments down below or head over to our forums we can have a more in-depth discussion all right thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give 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