This page outlines the various option available to create high availability for a VoIP PBX. Some are generic solutions while others are PBX specific. Some are complete HA solutions while others are half-baked scripts that do some things but not others.
Before you select a HA solution, carefully read this page on creating / selecting a High Availability solution (see Asterisk High Availability Design )
Before you select a HA solution, carefully read this page on creating / selecting a High Availability solution (see Asterisk High Availability Design )
PBX Specific Solutions (Application Level Cluster)
These solutions provide clusters that are PBX specific. As noted on the Asterisk High Availability Design wiki page, these solutions create clusters at the Application level and are deeply PBX aware, environmentally aware, trunk aware, etc. The benefit of these solutions is that they are easy to install and provide complete clustering (heartbeat, data synchronizations, failure detection, sharing IP, etc.). The downside of these solutions is that they are PBX specific, so if your PBX software (eg: Asterisk, 3CX, FreeSwitch) is not listed below then you can't use these solutions.- HAAst (High Availability for Asterisk) from Generation D Systems 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.
Bundled HA Solutions (with OS Level Cluster)
These solutions use generic heartbeat/clustering at the OS level, bundled with a custom version of Asterisk. They use their own variant of Asterisk, custom GUI, etc. As noted on the Asterisk High Availability Design wiki page, these solutions create clusters at the OS level and are not deeply Asterisk aware, environmentally aware, trunk aware, etc. The benefit of these solutions is that they use off-the-shelf pieces to creat a cluster, the down side is they mirror corrupt data from one peer to the other, they don't detect deep Asterisk related & environmental failures, and they can be complex to administer (the HA). Some of these are clearly works in progress as well.- 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.
- 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. ...