I am the network admin at a church. I have two PBX 60 devices that I set up on version 14 when I installed the new phone systems. At the time, I thought the idea of running a warm spare would be best so that I could cut down time in case of a failure, so I have that working, no problem. My question is this: since I have two devices, is it better to run one as a warm spare, or should I go ahead and cut the spare off and leave it sitting? In the case of a failure on the primary device, I could simply restore the backup on the secondary unit. It seems that they are both currently running and suffering the exact same amount of wear and tear, whereas I could be keeping the secondary unit as a practically new unit. Is this not correct? What are the practical benefits of the warm spare in this scenario? I download backups and keep them on a computer and in the cloud.
just musing here,
Pros, be green a likely save $710
https://www.sherweb.com/blog/cloud-server/total-cost-of-ownership-of-servers-iaas-vs-on-premise/
(Cant really think of any more)
Cons
The nice shiny one in the box will drain its 'CMOS battery ', not a biggie, but Maybe three years from now you will have problems booting unassisted .
(cant think of any more)
Suggestion, pay DO or Vultr or the like $60 a year and sell the backup server on ebay to pay for the first couple of years (maybe 4 if your quick 
)
Vultr is $5/month for the instance and you can get automated backups for $1/month more. It is like a total no brainer.
For $72/year you have something that cannot (well 99.99999%) fail unless you really screw something up.
This is why I use Vultr, for most systems, I have the backup set to nightly @ 01:00 UST. This is so anytime after 19:00 CST (my local timezone) I can run updates and know I can simply roll back.
Buy 1 cloud server in US Primary and 1 in Europe Backup, use Twilio SIP Trunk because twilio has the option if the primary server goes down it redirect calls to the backup server. On the client side softphone register 2 accounts 1 for the primary server and 1 for backup server after that you dont need to worry anymore if the primary server goes down.
If it sounds too good to be true…
Last 30 day availability in frankfurt: 99.4483% downtime: 4.14 hours
Feb 26, 2020
VULTR - Chicago | Partial Outage
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.
Feb 26, 23:04 CET
Investigating - We have detected that our upstream provider VULTR is experiencing partial outage in Chicago region that could lead to delays and server inaccessibility and other operations in this particular region. They are investigating the issue at this point in time. We would update once we get more information about this. Any inconvenience that might be caused is deeply regretted.
Feb 26, 10:32 CET
Yeah, I appreciate the suggestions, but I have two really nice on site hardware devices that have worked flawlessly and are paid for, so I really am not looking for hosted services. I ended up just unplugging the spare in the rack, so if I need it, I can just plug it in and change the ip address.
Thanks again for taking the time to interact!
That is perfectly reasonable. You might want to plug in the spare every X months, double-check it at least still boots up clean, and maybe even go as far as to try running some phones on it with some test calls in and out of the system. (After hours.) It could be that future security/package updates of your primary cause something to change so that the secondary is no longer drop-in compatible, in this case, you’d probably need to schedule full system upgrades on both units to sync them up again.
Slightly aside, it seems on these forums that if you so much as mention the word cloud you get lots of lightning strikes aimed at on-prem solutions – even when harwdare is spelled out right there in the OP! – but what is old is new again and the future is edge computing.
Back to the OP…
Do you support over-head Paging of all phones (this is an area where hosted/cloud is almost universally worse for single-site setups vs. on-prem/edge solutions) ?
Also, tested emergency calling recently ? That’s changing – see related threads elsewhere – so the chances your secondary system gets out-of-sync with primary system regarding 911 is much greater in 2020 than in years past.
There’s a Wiki article about setting and maintaining a Warm Spare system for just this specific situation. I recommend it.
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