I have a working FreePBX 15 system. I want to migrate it to a new server (currently it is on premises and we want it hosted now). I decided to try out the Warm Spare functionality in the new Backup Module.
I spun up the new system and updated everything. But I did not activate it. My logic was if it is a warm spare, it should get the info from the backup that is pushed to it right?
Well this led to a problem. The API call apparently dies because of the self signed cert that is all a new system has.
I can activate the system, but this does not make logical sense to me. Because if I fail over to it then I won’t be activated for the purchased commercial modules. This system specifically has SysAdmin Pro and Endpoint Manager.
A Warm Spare setup is two active FreePBX systems that has one backup and restore to the other system. That’s it. So when it says you need to identical boxes that means if Box A is licensed with EPM and Paging Pro then Box B must also be licensed with EPM and Paging Pro for those modules to work on it.
So now you have Box A and Box B both activated and licensed with the modules you want. Now Box A has all the actual information on it, so now you setup a Backup/Restore job to backup Box A, store it on Box B and then restore that data from Box A to Box B. So at this point you are just moving data nothing else because this is a backup. Just like you can take it and put it on S3 storage, go into Box B and restore from that S3 storage.
Even with the HA module, box systems were required to be activated and licensed with everything so that meant 2x all the commercial modules you wanted (including 2 licenses for HA one for each box).
Also with a Warm Spare, I can have Box A backup to Box B and Box C so that would mean 3x’s the licensing because why should Box B and Box C just be included? At any point those could be stand alone boxes just by removing backup jobs.
@BlazeStudios Honestly this is what I expected to happen. It is more of the bad design choices that the original Schmoozecom team made when they implemented commercial modules.
That said, the activation code phones home daily. One would think something could have be done to work with that logic.
The new flexibility of the backup and restore module means that people will be able to easily do proper migrations and upgrades between hardware or cloud hosts. So this needs to be dealt with properly by the system.
That also said, I would prefer that Sangoma just deal with getting rid of the Zend infrastructure so we can move on to some kind of actual modern versions of PHP and on to RHEL/CentOS 8.
