Avaya Session Manager - Rebooting AST Devices

We recently upgraded our SMGR/SMs to version 10.2.1.2 and discovered that remotely rebooting more than 50 J179 phones at once causes the Session Manager to crash. Before the upgrade, we were able to reboot hundreds of phones simultaneously without any issues.

Avaya Support has determined that rebooting large batches of phones generates a high volume of reload messages, which leads to the Session Manager restarting. Their current recommendation is to limit future reboots to no more than 15 phones at a time, and they’ve indicated this will be highlighted in future documentation.

This doesn't seem reasonable given that their larger deployments support tens of thousands of endpoints. I have a couple of questions for the group:

1. Has anyone else encountered this issue after upgrading to 10.2.1.2 (or another recent release)?

2. How are you handling bulk phone reboots for software or settings updates if SMGR limits you to 15 devices at a time? We’re considering controlling PoE at the switch level, but that would also affect non‑Avaya devices, so it’s not ideal.