[Freeswitch-users] FreeSWITCH HA + Loadbalancing

[Steve Underwood]

This sounds like so many "redundancy" projects that will probably offer 
nothing in the real world.

On 08/30/2009 05:52 AM, Pete Mueller wrote:
> I guess I should also mention that Xen is a side-project.
>
> When considering this issue for an existing production systems, we 
> chose to put as much HA into hardware as we can.  We are not concerned 
> with FS crashing, as so far we've never seen that happen (except when 
> our module caused it :)  So for each of our systems:
> - We have dual NIC cards (onboad NIC + PCI card) both bridged together 
> in case one fails
NICs hardly ever fail. Its the wiring which is the vulnerable area. How 
independent can you make the two wiring paths, when they come from the 
same box?
> - We have redundant power supplies.
Even with a good UPS, power fails more often than a high quality power 
supply. Just how independent are the two power sources feeding your two 
power supplies? Do you have two completely independent UPS sets? Do you 
have spacially diverse wiring from them?
> - We use Mirrored Solid State Disks for local storage (far better MTBF 
> than HDD, a lot faster too)
My experience so far is that SSD reliability is very poor, with entire 
drives disappearing, rather than just getting the odd bad sector. I 
guess to balance this, hard disk drive reliability seems to have 
plummeted in the last year or so, after several good years.
> - All but OS and speed-critical data is stored on a NAS device
NAS == more wiring. More wiring == more vulnerabilities. Are you sure 
your setup is a win? NAS tends to help keep the data secure, but it 
isn't good for reliable access to that data.
> - We have redundant DBs with Memcache infront for speed
>
> At the same time we chose to use COTS hardware (SuperMicro 
> chassis/MoBo) rather than the big-boys like IBM or Dell.  This kept 
> the overall cost per machine low.  Initially some were concerned that 
> not having a name like IBM on our servers would be concerning to some 
> potential clients.  The solution was to pay a company to deisgn and 
> build a custom face plate for the SuperMicro boxes.  Which oddly looks 
> more impressive to clients that a rack full of IBM faceplates.  It was 
> suprisingly low cost for the faceplates too.
Some years ago we made an entire custom chassis for off the shelf 
boards. The quotes for fabricating that in small numbers were all over 
the place, but we ended with a good quality chassis at low cost. Most 
off the shelf rack mount enclosures are really pricy, so it isn't that 
hard to match their price with a custom build. We ended up with  a 
better design (at least for our purposes) that cost us no more. It can 
really make your stuff stand out.

A simple respray of the front panel can achieve a distinctive look at 
low cost too. :-)
>
> For scalability, OpenSIPS was our choice.  There's a very nice 
> tutorial on their website on how to configure Load Balancing.

Regards,
Steve