Looking for Suggestions - Redundancy Failover (more so replication) tracking

General Help
1

So…

We have a new client that has 18 physical locations. I asked them a variety of questions including if they have any company wide VPN set up so everything is within the same network.. Waiting for a response on that. We have set up FreeePBX with close to 2 dozen clients so far - all working well.

One of the first questions they asked me is “What if the internet goes down ?” and apparently this is a pretty standard issue with some of their sites. Some of their sites have 20+ phone lines, one has 35 lines. If we install an on site FreePBX with their problem sites, even if the internet does go down, at least they can still do interoffice calling. We are also looking into a 2nd WAN connection as a failover for some of their sites.

I know we can set up more than 1 FreePBX system, and through our SIP provider I can set multiple (failover) nodes, so if one site / IP Address is unreachable, it automatically tries another site.

My ultimate question is, If we do the multiple site FreePBX (even just 2 locations) Is there a way to synchronize the 2 (or more) systems so they contain all of the same extensions, and call log history ? How would this be accomplished ?

These guys are a non profit org, so it will be important to get call counts and call time, so they can prove their data in grant funding.

2

Don’t put the pbx in one of their location, host it somewhere else or get a VPS

3

That probably makes things worse. If that site goes down, both sites lose their ability to make internal calls. Also it would depend on the internet, so provides no protection against the internet going down.

4

We only have a half dozen physical site locations, but for us we have some peace of mind through hosting the FreePBX in AWS land. Each site location has a primary Internet link (i.e. - fiber DIA) and a secondary Internet link (i.e. - CMTS). These links are through different providers. Thankfully widespread AWS outages are infrequent, and you can spin up the FreePBX EC2 instance in another region if there were to be an extended outage in one region. Knock on wood things have been smooth the past 5-6 years.