Hello all

I’m new on this list and rather green when it comes to IP telephony in general. During the last year or so I have been managing an existing setup with an Asterisk 1.4 server and a web-based user interface. The user interface is geared towards small medical clinics (typically 2 – 10 users in each) and we currently have in the region of 20 clinics. This setup has been running for 4 years or so.

My employees want to expand our client base into the thousands based on the interface which has a lot of functionality. My problem is that our current setup does not allow for load-balancing of the Asterisk server since all the code is written based on the assumption that there is only one server. Our current short-term plan is simply to duplicate the setup if the load on our current Asterisk server gets too big. That way some of our clients would use setup A, others would use setup B etc. This is obviously not optimal and doesn’t really give a decent level of fault tolerance.

Our web interface allows users to create and manage voice messages, menus, queues, to transfer calls, view callers in queue etc. All sound files can be created through the web interface by utilising the user’s phone.

Rewriting the code behind the user interface so that it can talk to more than one telephony server in a load-balancing setup is presumably the way to go. This can be done using Asterisk, and I presume, also using FreeSWITCH. But which would be easier? The Asterisk solution would require quite a lot of coding.

The problems I can foresee is mostly managing queues and the location of user-created sound files. My preferred solution would be a collection of load-balancing IP servers that presented a unified interface for me to program against, but that may not be possible?

I am very much intrigued by the claims FreeSWITCH makes regarding performance, load balancing and fault tolerance. Using XML or writing code is no problem, but obviously I want the best solution with minimum coding effort J

I’d love to hear what opinions and pointers you could give me, thanks in advance

Binni

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