[asterisk-users] What is your Backup Strategy?

[Forrest Beck]

I was just curious to what your redundancy solution is.  I have
considered many options, so I thought I would share and get an idea
for what others are doing.  My setup is two different locations with a
10MB WLAN fiber link between the two.  Each location has it's own PRI
as well.

I have considered and tested many options this last year or so.

1)  Using hearbeat and drbd to monitor the servers.  When the primary
fails the backup will assign itself the virtual ip used between the
two, and then mount the drbd disk which has the asterisk configs and
voicemail.  The biggest con to this is hearbeat just monitors a ping
response either over IP or a COM port.  So if the asterisk service
dies, heartbeat will not fail over.  Although I think there are work
arounds for this.  The newest version is suppose to have support for
monitoring a TCP port as well....

2)  Have two servers with the same dialplan.  One in each location.
Each server has it's own TDM cards installed. Phones on Site A will
register with the server on Site A, and phones on Site B will register
with the server on Site B. Then using Polycom phones, they will
failover to using the server not on their site, if their primary isn't
available.  I have setup scripts to copy the dialplan from one server
to the other then reload asterisk nightly.  The biggest Con to this is
I have to be sure my dialplans don't get different.  The user's
voicemail wouldn't be available until their primary server is back up,
but that's OK.

3)  Having a main asterisk server and a smaller VoIP gateway at each
site.  The gateway is a small 14inch deep rack server with a P4 and
1Gig RAM running asterisk.  It will host the TDM cards, and just
handle traffic to/from the PRI.  The main asterisk server will just
see it as a SIP trunk.  The failover here is that the polycom phones
will register with the gateway if the primary server isn't available.
They won't have all the features and voicemail, but at least they can
dial out and get 911 if needed.

What do you think?  Do you have a better solution?

Thanks!!

-- 
***
Forrest Beck
IAXTEL: 17002871718
jonforrest.beck at gmail.com