PBXAct UC High Availability 365x7x24

We have some questions about a HA Setup.

If one of both PBX fails, does the other PBX come online automatic and there is nothing else to do?

We have a customer who wants an offer for about 15 Locations with each about 50 to 100 Extensions.
This means i need 30 PBX Acts and 15 HA Licenses and a lot of phones.

Is the HA License already included in the UC 300?

The customer wants High Availability, but for the moment we have not enough staff to have a person free around the clock every minute.

If we sell the PBX with HA, we thought that nothing could possibly really happen and the failed PBX can be changed during the next days.

Am i right or is it negligently to do this?

Yes, failover is automatic.

No. HA licensing is PER NODE, so 15 clusters means 30 PBXs and 30 HA licenses.

Not sure what you are asking here. If you’re asking if you can set up an HA cluster with a single node, and add a second node later, yes you can do that.

The question means if it is negligently to offer HA PBXACT but we are not available 24/7 at the moment.
In your experience. Is a HA PBXACT enough regularly to offer the customer 24/7?

Sure there can be other problems like Trunk is down or so, but this can also be failovered to other numbers. But how probably is it possible that both nodes at the same time do not work anymore when no one changed anything in the running pbx?
In your oppinion, would you offer HA when you know, that you are not available as a person 24/7 ?

Another Question:
If the customers uses Third Party phone EPM and XactView.
Does he have to buy the modules twice or only the HA Module?

If you are available 24/7 on short notices you don’t need HA. Generally HA will fail over in an orderly fashion, so you can service the failed node at your leisure. If your customer demands an SLA that requires 24/7 support that you can’t provide, Sangoma does offer that.

That is what HA is basically designed for. Allow for fail over without manual intervention. If one server dies, the other one will took over and you replace the bad one when you have time.

You have to purchase commercial modules for each server.
So a two server HA cluster means you buy EPM twice.

We live in Austria, i know that you do not have Technical German Speaking Employees at the moment. This is the reason why we cannot give the SLA to Sangoma for now. No Customer wants to have English Support if there is a problem.

1 Like

Sounds like this is the thing i need. Does the HA Module only check if the other server is up? Or will it also check if asterisk and all other services are running? It should also failover when both PBX are online but a service crashed and will not come up anymore because of any reason.

It exactly does that.
It checks different services like Asterisk, mysql, httpd, etc and will fail over the service to the other node if it crashes.
So if Asterisk crashes, the other server will take over that service.

1 Like

This. The primary node will first attempt to restart asterisk and if that attempt fails, or if it must restart again, it will trigger a fail-over to the secondary node automatically.

Some of this is covered in the wiki in case you haven’t seen it:
https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/FreePBX+High+Availability

1 Like

Be warned, unless you are using VMware or similar, failover does not occur on complete power loss. IPMI as a fencing method is not sufficient. Standard tools (like networked PDUs and whatnot) are not supported. Sangoma quoted me something like $5000 last time I asked for this to be implemented to fill in for what IPMI fencing lacks. I would seriously advise against relying on the FreePBX HA module unless you’re in a virtual environment. And even then, test test test test test and then test one more time.