From my understanding of it, a backup can be made any time from 1 minute (not recommended) to once a year and dumped onto a server standing by. The issue I am still a little fuzzy on is, then what? You have two identical servers on the same connection behind the same NAT with different IP addresses and for some (highly unlikely) reason, the primary server stops working but fortunately it just did a backup onto the secondary server. How would the secondary server take off and become the primary server? The article above alludes to the fact that really can’t and relies on a sysadmin starting the task. What if you do not have 24*7 support, what can be done to make sure the freepbx2 takes off and becomes active?
What are some real live examples people have done to ensure two identical servers can work together and switch over to the backup?
Secondly, if you cannot monitor the asterisk box 24 hours a day, would you recommend some kind of datacenter solution specific to asterisk/freepbx?
Asterisk had a demonstration of this at their astricon last year and set it up as if the three servers were in different locations and one of them was shutoff but the calls never dropped. Pretty kick ass. For my setup, there wouldn’t be a need to have the servers in a different location but I would like it to activate if the primary fails.
To those who setup asterisk systems for a living: how often do you also setup a backup server? All the time, depends on the need, infrequent, often, etc.
We are using the High Availability backup and restore feature to pull a backup of the primary server and restore it to the secondary server. We are now struggling with the actualy failover portion. I think the Flip1405 solutions would resolve the automatic failover problem for us, but whould about the call recordings and CDR’s?