Coming from the Nortel world (well Avaya now) I have integrated an Asterisk server to all our Meridian PBX systems to support VOIP and interoffice calls using G729 and it actually works better than the Nortel solution.
Over the next few years we are planning to retire our Nortel PBX systems, however these system are rock solid from reliability point of view; I have not had any problems with the Asterisk servers that I setup and they are working much better than expected. With that said I would like to hear/know about what people have done to make the asterisk server a high availability solution. With Nortel large PBX systems you have two CPU cores, two network shelves that connect to IPE shelves that control the phones. Can you build something the similar in Asterisk? Can you setup Asterisk on a Red Hat Cluster? I would love to setup 2 servers as Core/Gateway servers that only deal with inbound and outbound connections (not phones) We have 4 PRI's - I would like to setup 2 PRI's in Gateway 1 and 2 PRI's in Gateway 2, then a third server "PhoneServer" that all the sets are programmed up on which then connects to both gateways VIA isolated network (direct connect), that way either of the gateways can be down for maintenance and you will still receive inbound and outbound calls. This I feel is pretty simple, but I don't see an easy way to make the PhoneServer a failover server - Thought using Red Hat Cluster may work. I like the idea of this setup as I would like to have a fax server and a call center server each as a separate machine. Has anyone setup asterisk in this way? Thanks. Robert Brock Telecom Administrator, MKS Inc., www.mks.com<http://www.mks.com> Waterloo, ON, Canada Tel: 519-883-3243 or 800-265-2797 x3243 Fax: 519-884-8861
