[Freeswitch-users] HA questions.

[Tim Uckun]

I have read some of the archived emails about HA, loadbalancing,
failover etc and I am still a bit confused about how I could set up
some sort of resiliency with freeswitch.

My situation is much less complex than the scenarios people were
talking about and I hoping the solution is similarly much less
complex.

I have two machines. Both will run freeswitch and also an IVR
application with local databases.  I will take care of the database,
application and configuration synchronization between the two
machines.  Ideally the calls would be load balanced between the
machines and if any application falls down then the calls should go to
the other machine. Same if I take a machine down for whatever reason.

If a machine goes down I am willing to "lose" those people who were
making a call at the time. I do have a flag in the application which
will stop answering the calls while processing the existing calls for
a graceful shutdown and hopefully the load balancer would shuttle the
calls to the other machine while this is happening.

At this stage everything is done via SIP.

My questions are...

Do I have to have a sip proxy? If the answer is yes it seems like I
have to set up two sip proxies so I don't have another single point of
failure. Can I load the sip proxies on the same machine? Do I need two
more machines?

If I take load balancing out of the picture would it be possible to do
a simple linux HA or a windows built in ip failover solution? Would a
simple IP failover work over UDP or would I have to use IAX and tcp/ip
?

Is it better to go the virtualization route?

Sorry if these are dumb questions. I am just trying to get my head
wrapped around this. I don't need five nines (although that would be
awesome), I just want a reasonable degree of assurance that my app can
keep taking calls in case something weird happens.