[asterisk-biz] Looking for carrier grade redundant solution

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

>     From the reading I've done, running SER as a proxy to the two
>     application servers should serve it's purpose well, providing load
>     balancing and monitoring of the application server behind it
>     (should one Asterisk box return a 3XX-5XX I would then route
>     advance to the second application server and take the first offline.
>
>     Question - Is running SER by best bet here? Would I be better off
>     running a heartbeat between the two app servers?
>
Well, if you're running SER, then you add another layer of complexity. 
The more you have, and the more you're likely to run into issues.

If I was you, I would look more into "what can I do in case of server 
crash" ?

Maybe the right solution is to have:

a) reliable hardware
b) a known and tested restore procedure which takes no longer than 60 
minutes
c) have one or even two "backup, ready to be restored" boxes nearby in 
case of problems

Even if you have a couple of hardware crashes in a year, if it takes 
less that an hour to do the recovery, it's still > 99.999 % availability...

Sometimes "high availability" is simpler than you think.

Cheers,
Jean-Michel.