[asterisk-users] HA Asterisk

[Jonathan Thurman]

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 1:10 AM, A E [Gmail] <all.eforums at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, I wonder what're the alternatives that people have been using for
> Asterisk HA other than commercially available solutions like HAAST and
> Astribanks assuming that kaushal is right and SCF isn't production ready
> yet. Anyone wants to chime in here with a solution built with readily
> available linux software like heartbeat , linux-ha, shared filesystems,
> filesystem replication and of course asterisk realtime? My requirement might
> be more along the lines of having several asterisk servers in a farm/pool
> without actually caring about the failover, so it might not even matter for
> me to worry about all of this, but I'm still curious as to what people are
> doing out there.

For our specific needs we have build an active/passive Asterisk
cluster based on CentOS 5 and cman/drbd/gfs2.  Two nodes replicate
data (configs, voicemail, provisioning data) on a Master/Master DRBD
volume, using GFS2 as the shared file system.  We use Asterisk
Realtime via ODBC (MySQL Backend) for SIP/Extensions/CDR.  All
services bind to a floating IP Address.  CMAN controls what server is
running the services at any time, and handles migrating of the IP as
well.  Lights Out cards (via IPMI) are used for fencing.

For access to the PSTN, I prefer to use an external device.  We run a
mix of Cisco 2800's and AudioCodes Mediant 1000's.  I prefer to use
PSTN to SIP gateways over cards built-in to the servers, or Astribanks
as I feel they are more flexible.  You could allow direct media, or
allow multiple servers to communicate with the gateways at that same
time.

So that is the setup that we have chosen, and it might not be right
for anyone else.  The best advice I can give is to implement something
at your comfort level, and test test test!  I am aware of the
potential issues with our setup, and am prepared to deal with them
because of extensive testing.

-Jonathan