The plan is to have a primary and backup FreePBX server. If the primary PRI or server goes down we will have the telco automatically route to the backup PRI/server/location.
The plan is to use the backup and restore module to SSH the configs over the VPN to the backup server.
To test this I would like to use Polycom and Cisco phones, I believe I should just need to put in the primary and backup server IP. I am currently using endpoint manager in FreePBX and have the Polycoms working to the one server.
My question is, can someone tell me how to modify the config so that I can have both lines have a primary and secondary server IP. In theory (or the way I envision it) I should be able to turn off the primary server and have the phone see that it can’t contact the primary and roll over to the backup.
haproxy is your friend here.
configure the devices to point at the haproxy IP address.
haproxy will reroute to the current primary PBX as appropriate.
I am going to have these servers at different locations. I believe that I can use the phones to have a primary and secondary IP address to failover?
Wow, that is an example of very bad advice on a public forum. SIP uses UDP by default, HAPROXY is a TCP based load balancer. It is designed for web server farms not phones systems. In fact it would have no way of knowing the state of the Asterisk server.
Your main problem with using primary and secondary servers is a matter of split homing. You need to synchronize the PSTN failover and phone registration or you are going to orphan something.
This is easier with SIP trunks, if you are using PSTN facilities you need to use a gateway.
Various Asterisk HA schemes have been hatched using DRDB, heartbeat and HSRP interfaces. They work but require a sysadmin to watch over as they are finicky beasts.
On a basic level your phone will use the backup proxy if it can’t reach the primary proxy. This is useful for survivable outbound dialing and lifeline services access.
We are going to have two physical locations, I am going to say with 2 PRIs at each location. I have spoke with the telco and they have the ability to fail the trunk groups over to the backup location.
My plan is to use the SSH part of the backup and recovery module to backup the primary and restore to the secondary.
I am trying to figure out how to assign the backup proxy to a Polycom phone using endpoint manager and will then test the functionality using some test VMs and a SIP trunk.