[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk, enterprise edition (New subject)

[Nick Bachmann]

> WipeOut wrote:
>
>>>
>> Asterisk would need some kind of clustering/load balancing ability
>> (Single IP system image for the IP phones across multiple servers) to
>> be  truely "Enterprise Class" in terms of both reliability and
>> scaleability..  Obviously that would not be as relevent for the analog
>>  hard wired phones unless the channelbanks and T1/E1 lines could be
>> automatically switched to another server..

Switching a T1 automagically seems like it would be an easy hack, but it
wouldn't be needed for customers who had more than one T1 (like, say, most
Enterprises :-).  The exception to this is people who are muxing their
internal phones, of course.
> Anyone that have peeked into Vovidas heartbeat/cluster architecture?

Yes, I've played with it a bit.  It's pretty simplistic... the clustering
just keeps several servers in sync with each other.  I suppose that would
be easy to do with Asterisk, especially if configuration data was stored
in a RDBMS that could do replication.  Even now, setting up a copy/reload
routine isn't difficult.
It also seems that if you had a load balancer set up in front of your *
servers to balance the call requests, you'd have enough clustering to keep
one failure from taking down the whole system. Since the load balancer
keeps an affinity table (and monitors to make sure the servers aren't
going down) all VoIP connections could end up at the same * box once they
had been allocated, unless a server goes down, in which case the call
probably gets dropped. Any planned downtime could be made without any
disruptions, since you could stop the load balancer from allocating any
more connections to the * box and use 'stop when convenient' to wait for
all current calls to end.
Nick