FreePBX Failover Options/Questions

General Help
1

I know there’s the FreePBX Advanced Recovery Option, as of version 15:
https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/Advanced+Recovery

I know there’s also Tellium:
https://telium.io/en/high-availability-for-freepbx/
(Which seems complex when I look up the Setup manual, but I heard its highly competant)

And then there’s option 3, but I don’t fully know what the ramifications are, if any…but I would like to still run it by the community. Let’s say I didn’t care about voice mail for the fail-over etc, And I just wanted a system that I could quickly move over to in a jam, to keep phones going. What if I:

  1. Created a new system for the fail over
  2. Gave it a new IP Address
  3. Restored the backup to it, so its identical
  4. Made sure the IP was still unique
  5. Put it in a new location on my WAN (I route to all my VLANS, so all sites can see each other)
    (Steps 1 -5 are of course to prepare the failover and done ahead of time)
  6. All phones have a DNS record for the SIP server already
  7. We have a NAT record on our edge device that just maps to the PBX, we of course ONLY currently allow the SIP gateway provider to talk to the PBX with needed services.
  8. The NAT record can be changed in seconds to POINT to whatever internal record I want, I have done this many times before.
  9. All phones are currently hard-coded with the DNS of the Current FreePBX server record and other needed settings by design.

In this scenario, I would have an exact clone of my FreePBX system running in the new location. Upon Disaster Recovery or maintenance, I would point the Centralized DNS record at the New internal IP. For external services coming in from SIP gateway, I would re-point the EXTERNAL NAT VIP to the secondary server in the new location. At this point, all the phones are talking to the secondary FreePBX server, and the NAT VIP is happily talking to the new freepbx for gateway services. Everyone should be talking on the phones again at this point.

Since I don’t care about new voicemails etc for this period of time (Syncing them), and this point would finish my maintenance windows or disaster recover the original system from my newest backup (I can do a bare metal restore, and file level with my backup sysyem). There is no specific auto configration done for my phones from any centralized system, I just lean on DNS and other hard coded settings to date, and back up the phones config files. This has worked great to date. There should be no exchange between the FreePBX servers and the phones EXCEPT for SIP registration and communication for services. In my mind we should be good. Am I missing anything?

2

Sounds like you could start with setting up SRV records for SIP (UDP and TCP and TLS if appropriate) on your nameservice (DNS) and have the phones, if capable, register against said SRV’s on a regular basis, there will be no “state” but new calls should flow both ways if your VSP’s can equally use SRV records to get to your PBX

3

Okay, I am looking into SRV records, and also DNS Record Fail-over, good suggestion!

4

I may take a peak at the advanced recovery module as well.

5

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