asterisk users - Oct 2009 - Asterisk HA Current Thoughts (Centos 5.3 Platform)

I'm looking into doing an HA setup for a Asterisk 1.4 install on  
Centos.  I've seen a number of different pointers to packages for this  
some of which are packages that seem quite dated from an update  
perspective (Ultra Monkey links I've seen haven't been updated in a  
while).  What is the current best practice on this for this platform?   
My first foray into any of the Linux HA setups but not afraid of the  
command line.

Jim

I have been working on a HA procedure for Asterisk on CentOS 5.3, but
haven't had time to publish it.  It is a little complex, but here are
the components used:

- CentOS 5.3
- Asterisk 1.6 (version doesn't matter)
- MySQL
- Cluster services
- GFS2
- DRBD

A basic run-down is:

* Two servers configured with DRBD in Master-Master mode.  All data is
replicated between the two so in case of a failure there should be
very limited data loss (voicemail) if any at all.

* MySQL and Asterisk run on the same node.  If you have an external
MySQL server / don't use MySQL, then this is not an issue.  The MySQL
data directory is also mounted on a GFS2/DRBD partition.  The most
important thing here is to use INNODB, NOT MYISAM!  MyISAM doesn't
take kindly fail-over...

* Using Cluster services enables you to create GFS2 file systems (on
top of DRBD) so that both nodes can see the data at the same time.
This is important to reduce the time required for fail-over.  Cluster
services also handles starting/stopping the services, and migrating
the Virtual IP address between nodes.

* DHCP (if needed) runs on both nodes, as DHCP has native support for
fail-over configuration.

It's pretty easy to get installed and running.  I also create RPMS for
Asterisk, so that the version on each service is the exact same.  I
can upgrade one node, use the cluster manager to fail-over to the
other node (during a maintenance window of course!).

The biggest issue now is that the CentOS Repo is somewhat broken for
Cluster... but there is a work around on the bug tracker for CentOS.
Hopefully that will be resolved soon.

Let me know off list if you need any help!

-Jonathan



On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:58 AM, James Hankins
<jim at allpointsmediaworks.com> wrote:
> I'm looking into doing an HA setup for a Asterisk 1.4 install on
> Centos. ?I've seen a number of different pointers to packages for this
> some of which are packages that seem quite dated from an update
> perspective (Ultra Monkey links I've seen haven't been updated in a
> while). ?What is the current best practice on this for this platform?
> My first foray into any of the Linux HA setups but not afraid of the
> command line.
>
> Jim
>
>
>
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Google for some of the How Tos built around Elastix and Trixbox. Both of these
are CentOS based as well.

good luck. 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Hankins" <jim at allpointsmediaworks.com> 
To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion"
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Friday, October 2, 2009 1:58:15 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: [asterisk-users] Asterisk HA Current Thoughts (Centos 5.3 Platform) 

I'm looking into doing an HA setup for a Asterisk 1.4 install on 
Centos. I've seen a number of different pointers to packages for this 
some of which are packages that seem quite dated from an update 
perspective (Ultra Monkey links I've seen haven't been updated in a 
while). What is the current best practice on this for this platform? 
My first foray into any of the Linux HA setups but not afraid of the 
command line. 

Jim 



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