[This post and the 5 that follow were split from an unrelated thread - mod]
Things obviously aren’t going as originally planned. Whether we will ever see HA on Freepbx 15 is questionable. Was it 2 years ago when we heard that HA on Freepbx 14 is very very close to release?
Pretty much everyone saying so then has now left Sangoma.
Rob, Andrew, Tony, Bryan and others, pretty much most of the core Freepbx developer base and original Schmooze people have left the company.
The delay in the release of Freepbx 15 and the new HA is probably due to the significant brain drain that Sangoma has suffered.
Well except for the fact HA has been promised in 14 since 2017, v15 was to be stable in Jan 2018. The problem with that statement is that the brain drain, so to speak, happened in the last 4-5 months. So what was the reasoning for the delays for over a year up to that point. v14 is now two years old. We’ve been promised things for the last two years that have not materialized as promised or in some cases boasted.
As I said, part of the issue as I see it is the lack of LTS _and/or_plans. In a discussion with the devs in the IRC room about a year or so back I was told their roadmaps have no time frames, due dates or any sort of firm scheduling. It was during this conversation in which the real question was “How long until v13 is EOL” and not a single firm answer was given. There was “It will be supported for X release cycles” meaning that it would be EOL after the X version was released. This is also when we got the boast/promise of a 6 month release cycle making v13 EOL by v17 (which we should be on based on everything I said in my previous post).
Here’s where I’m at now with this. If before the end of 2019 Sangoma has their poop in a group and things start rolling again the question becomes is this causation or correlation to those that left in 2019.
We’re doing out best - there’s always a hit of some sort when people leave or decide to quit working with the project, but as time goes on, new people step up to the plate and life goes on (as per my other post).
FreePBX 15 is going through the internal Sangoma QA process right now. I can’t publicly give an exact date for FreePBX 15 release since you never know what is going to come up in the QA process, but I’d be surprised if it was far away.
We have our installs on HA, so we are still running FreePBX 13 for that reason, which is sort of end of life but not quite, as it’s the only version HA runs on.
I understand Sangoma has ventured into completely redesigning HA and that it’s a complicated piece of software, so who knows if it’ll see the light of day, so my question is what are your recommendations for people running HA currently but don’t want to remain on FreePBX 13 for the next few years.
Shall we just install FreePBX 15 once it’s out and forget about HA for the time being and instead use a warm spare server and then install HA once it’s out?
You could just do that on v14 which is out and stable vs waiting for v15 that has no real time table for being stable. Let’s be honest, there is no HA in v14+ right now because even in v13 it is problematic. I know someone that bought $30K worth of HA on v13 and had nothing but problems all on six instances he installed it.
At this level, Kamailio+FreePBX in Warm Spare setup is more than enough to deal with any failover on the network. Because with HA you still lose your calls and actually could lose registrations depending on the setup and how long it takes for things to jump over to the other system. At least with this setup, you just only lose calls.
We gave up with FreePBX HA both because it was very problematic, and we wanted to go to FreePBX 14. It also seem expensive for what it was having to double up on license/support costs.
We now use VMware HA which is much more versatile, in our case the FreePBX server can fail over between 6 hardware servers in 3 difference locations. It’s also easy to maintain once setup. It also only needs once set of FreePBX licenses and support cost.