Once you understand the design issues and trade-offs of creating / selecting a High Availability solution (see Asterisk High Availability Design ), consider the following products and solutions to help you meet your High Availability (HA) or Load Balancing needs:
- HAAst from GenerationD www.GenerationD.com adds high availability / clustering to any pair of Asterisk servers. The High Availability for Asterisk (HAAst) add-on offers rapid automatic failover of a failed peer, IP sharing, advanced peer health detection, intelligent synchronization of files and databases, etc. HAAst also supports manual promote/demote for maintenance, a command line interface, a telnet interface, a web based interface, and a developer API. Installation is straight forward, with no additional hardware required, no additional or complex heartbeat/cluster/etc software required either. HAAst is available in Free and Commercial editions, in use at call centers, hospitals, and other high-uptime environments. See High Availability Asterisk (HAAst) for more information.
- HiPBX is a new FOSS highly-available enterprise ready CentOS6/Asterisk/FreePBX distribution. It is currently being written by one of the original developers of FreePBX, and tightly integrates with (currently) Cisco SPA model phones. It provides Active Directory integration, automatic phone provisioning, user-configuration of phone features through their own Web interface, and cluster and node management through a GUI. This is all new software, and is not based off an existing project. It's currently under intensive development, and all source code is available on Github.
- DNS SRV on the CPE side but not all phones handle this.
- Redfone foneBRIDGE If you use T1/E1/PRI with Asterisk (or FreePBX, Elastix, Freeswitch, etc.), the foneBRIDGE is a solid and inexpensive solution for backup failover, high availability, and clustering. See detailed Asterisk High Availability HOWTO below for more info.
- Highly reliable, solid-state, external T1/E1 Bridge priced similar to T1/E1 interface cards
- Does not require external hardware to switch to backup server
- Can be implemented with single server today and add backup later by just adding a server
- Automatic failover to hot backup server in less than 20 seconds
- Available in 1, 2, and 4-port versions, with or without built-in Echo Cancellation
- SARK-HA from Aelintra Telecom offers High Availability Asterisk out-of-the box. Runs Aelintra's SARK UCS MVP on a pair of servers.... Real-time failover takes less than 20 seconds to complete and includes support for ISDN PRI circuits. The servers are kept in synch using rsync. Wiki pages HERE. System also includes multi-tenant and a fully integrated provisioning system with zero touch, DHCP-free set-up for multicast capable phones... see HERE.
